For a few years, I’ve written about the truck drivers who kill with trucks and bad decisions, and then a few years ago I got wrapped up in the FBI’s Highway Serial Killer Initiative. FBI has tracked more than 850 murdered women along the interstates since 2004, most of them last seen at truck stops, most of the suspects long-haul drivers who understood that a body in one state and a killer four states away is a case that never closes. The road is the weapon in those stories. The anonymity is the accomplice. I’ve spent a book and a career on highway predators and the bad apples of the industry. This story goes along the same lines but takes a turn to an isolated murder of a trucking company owner, Dee Warner, by her husband, Dale Warner. He’s essentially doing time right now for killing her and welding her body in an anhydrous storage tank.

Dee Warner wasn’t some woman who climbed into the wrong cab. She owned the trucks. She ran a fleet in Lenawee County, Michigan, held her own authority, and signed the paychecks. The man who killed her wasn’t a stranger passing through on I-90. He was her husband, and he farmed and drove on the same ground where he sealed her body into a fertilizer tank and told everyone she’d walked out.

Dee Warner disappeared the night of April 25, 2021, from the couple’s farm in Franklin Township, outside Tecumseh. She was 52. For three years, her family looked for a living woman. Her husband, Dale Warner, told them she’d left him without a word, cut off contact between Dee’s youngest child and the rest of the family, and let them believe she’d started over somewhere else. On August 17, 2024, Michigan State Police found what was left of her welded inside an anhydrous ammonia tank on property Dale owned. An autopsy ruled the death a homicide: strangulation and blunt force trauma to the face and head, both wrapped in duct tape. She was dressed in pajamas, wrapped in a tarp, and sealed in the steel.

A Lenawee County jury convicted Dale Warner of second-degree murder and tampering with evidence on March 10, 2026. On May 7, Judge Michael Olsaver sentenced him to 31 and a quarter to 60 years for the murder and a consecutive 17 months to 10 years for the tampering, up to 70 years all told. He’ll be eligible for parole in 33 years. He signed his appeal paperwork on the record the same day.

What the trucking company had to do with it

The reason this belongs in a trucking column and not just a true-crime one is what the prosecutors said set the last weekend in motion. Assistant prosecutor David McCreedy told the jury that tensions between Dale and Dee peaked the weekend of April 24 and 25, 2021, over a dispute involving employees of their trucking company, DDW. Dee had told family she planned to file for divorce and sell the business. She went missing that night.

The couple had met years earlier working at Crop Production Services and built the fleet together. McCreedy described a marriage run on surveillance rather than trust. Jurors were told Dale tracked Dee’s vehicle more than 2,000 times through OnStar, put a tracking device in her Hummer, photographed her text messages, and tried to have her phone cloned. “This marriage had no intimacy, just secrecy,” McCreedy said. Days before she vanished, Dee wrote that she and Dale didn’t even talk anymore, that they were just roommates, and that things had gotten much worse.

Prosecutors walked the jury through that final morning using the farm’s own surveillance footage. A front-end loader was seen driving up to the house around 7 a.m. on April 25, tire tracks leading to the porch. Dee’s vehicle stayed parked at home and was unlocked by Dale around 7:08 a.m. Minutes later, the loader moved toward the northeast corner of the property. Later that morning, McCreedy said, Dale remarked that Dee had left her wedding ring behind. He resisted calling police, and his children were the ones who eventually contacted authorities.

According to the prosecution, Warner kept farming and moved a tank while police were on the property, searched online for how to get rid of a large propane tank, and gathered welding supplies. Three years later, the tank he’d sealed gave back.

The defense, and what the jury did with it

Dale Warner’s attorney, Mary Chartier, told jurors the state had a theory and no proof. She argued the case was built on speculation and circumstantial evidence, that prosecutors couldn’t establish what happened during the overnight hours of April 24 into 25, and that others were on the farm that morning the investigation chose to look past. “The government has a theory, but there is no evidence to support that theory,” she said, and she accused investigators of focusing too narrowly on Dale.

The jury split the difference in a way worth noticing. It convicted, but on second-degree murder, not first. In finding him guilty of the lesser charge, jurors rejected the prosecution’s request for a first-degree conviction, which means they were not persuaded of premeditation. He killed her, the verdict says, but the panel would not sign its name to the idea that he planned it in advance. That distinction is now part of the record he’s appealing from, and it’s worth holding onto as this moves up.

The company she was going to sell

What everyone agrees on, because the prosecutor put it in front of the jury, is that Dee intended to sell DDW. What happened to the company after she was gone is not part of the criminal case. The murder trial was about how she died and how her body was hidden, not about who ended up with the trucks.

That story lives in the civil files. Dale Warner is a counter-plaintiff in a still-open commercial case involving DDW Investments that isn’t set for final pretrial until 2027. Separately, the personal representative of Dee’s estate has a civil action running against Dale that has been stayed and extended repeatedly through 2026. Those are the places where the question of the assets, the authority, and where the fleet went gets litigated on the record. Until it does, anything about the disposition of the company is a lead, not a finding, and I’ll report it when it’s papered and not before.

A trucking business is an asset that can move faster than a missing-person case. Authority, equipment, and contracts can change hands while a family is still putting up flyers. Dee Warner told the people close to her that she wanted out and wanted to sell. She didn’t get the chance to do either. The last decision she made about her own company was the one that, according to the state, got her killed for it.

The highway serial killings are a story about distance, a predator putting three states between himself and the body. This one is the opposite. Dale Warner didn’t need the interstate. He had a tank in his own yard and three years of telling his wife’s children she’d chosen to disappear. The trucks that were supposed to be Dee’s way out became the fight that ended her, and the farm that was supposed to be a life became the place she was hidden. Eight hundred and fifty women are dead along the roads, and most of their killers are still driving. Dee Warner isn’t one of those numbers. She was the owner, not the hitchhiker, and she was killed at home by the man who shared her name and her authority. Sometimes the most dangerous person in trucking isn’t the stranger behind the wheel. It’s the one who already has the keys.

Last year I spoke at the Auto Haulers Association on risk and compliance for fleets. Auto hauler fleets carry some of the biggest exposure in highway risk. That's not getting better; it's getting worse.

On a February night a few years back, a pickup truck pulling a wedge trailer loaded with two brand-new heavy-duty pickups ran out of fuel in the middle lane of a Midwest interstate. The engine sputtered for about a hundred meters and died. The right shoulder was clear. The driver had enough rolling speed to coast onto it and didn’t. He stopped squarely in a live lane of 65-mile-per-hour traffic, after dark, put out three reflective triangles in a geometry the regulation doesn’t recognize, with taped consumer flashlights to the tailgate of the rearmost pickup on the trailer. A man in his sixties, working that night in a Sprinter van for a small expediting outfit, came down that lane at highway speed and hit the back of the trailer. He died at the hospital about ninety minutes later.

The driver of the pickup held no US CDL of any class. He did have a Russian CDL though. The manufacturer’s combined weight rating for that truck and trailer requires a Class A CDL in every factory configuration. It was a hot-shot, a one-ton pickup pulling a car-hauler wedge. He got his US CDL about three months after the crash. He couldn’t answer the investigating trooper’s questions without a translation app, which matters because federal rule 49 CFR 391.11(b)(2) requires a driver to respond to official inquiries in English, and it matters more because a driver who can’t read the road can’t read the load. He didn’t know his own truck had run out of fuel until the trooper had him turn the key and look at the gauge. He’d been told, and he believed, that you don’t need a CDL to drive a pickup. Somebody put that man on the road with freight.

Four companies handed the load down a chain, and none of them was the company actually running the truck. A Fortune-scale shipper tendered finished new vehicles to a national haulaway carrier with more than sixty years of history and a contract that made it responsible for every subcontractor it used. That carrier brokered the load to a one-truck operation whose insurance schedule listed nothing but over-the-road tractors, meaning it could not haul the load itself and everyone with access to the policy could see it. The one-truck operation, which held no broker authority, re-brokered the load to a company that existed on the bill of lading and nowhere else. The truck itself was titled to a shell whose owner had left the country sixteen months earlier, operated day to day by a company that has never held motor carrier authority, dispatched by a man who rents out operating authority through companies he controls, and placarded in the window with the name of a fifth company that touched nothing but the sticker. The load changed hands four times before it reached a driver. So... a quadruple-brokered load to a ghost carrier with a principal place of business being an Airbnb, who gave it to a foreign driver with a Russian CDL.

It’s a network. How do we know? The national carrier’s dispatch sheet put three specific trucks on that order, identified by VIN. The trailer that got hit was carrying two trucks, and only one of them was from that order. The second came off a different order entirely. Somebody downstream had rebuilt the carrier’s loads across order boundaries, mixed vehicles from two separate dispatches onto one trailer, and left the rest sitting in the yard. Two days after the fatality, delivery receipts were completed showing every vehicle on both orders delivered clean and on time, signed by the same driver, on runs that a map says one driver couldn’t physically make in a day. The crash damage on the second truck was coded into a routine delivery inspection form as if it were ordinary transit damage. When the national carrier’s own brokerage director was shown those documents under oath, he called them what they are. Fraudulent. His company, he testified, never sent that load to the carrier named on the paper.

That director’s testimony is wild. He was candid, likable, and by every appearance honest, which is exactly what makes it worse. He ran the brokerage desk for a network of roughly fifteen hundred signed carriers, about five hundred hauling at any given time, with a staff of seven. He testified there was no written vetting policy. Not a thin one. None. Onboarding meant confirming the MC and DOT numbers were active and collecting an insurance certificate. A look at the public federal safety record was optional, undocumented, and not required of his dispatchers. Monitoring after onboarding meant watching the insurance expiration date. He never held a CDL. He received no training in the federal safety regulations, describing his education as learn-as-you-go. Asked about the safety rating his own contract required every carrier to warrant, he said he’d have to look it up. The one-truck carrier in this chain was unrated by the federal government, had a driver out-of-service rate nearly seven times the national average, and seventeen days before the crash was cited and placed out of service for the exact violation that defined this operation: driving a commercial vehicle without a CDL. The next morning, the desk assigned it eleven more loads. Shown that record in the deposition, the director said that if anyone had looked, the carrier would have been cut off on the spot. Nobody looked. The data was free; it sat on a public website, and pulling it takes about ninety seconds.

I drove the truck, ran the fleet, wrote the safety programs, brokered the work, and reconstructed the crashes, and I can tell you the driver you meet in these cases has changed over the years, and the carrier has changed even more. What’s changed most is the person running the desk. The director in this case came up through sales before landing in a trucking yard, moved to load building, then dispatch, then found himself heading the brokerage arm of a national carrier because the company went through bankruptcy and the man ahead of him left. That’s not a knock on him. He did the job he was handed with the tools he was given, and he owned his answers under oath, which is more than most. The knock is on an industry that hands that job to anyone without insisting they know the freight side.

My read, built on the cases that cross my desk every week and my history, Somewhere north of half the people now running sourcing, procurement, carrier, broker, and shipper operations - my own estimate is at least sixty percent - have no frontline experience in the industry they’re steering. The generation that grew up through it, the leaders who started on a dock or in a cab and rose because they understood what a 40 percent out-of-service rate means at 9:30 on a Tuesday night, has been replaced in large part by private equity operators, venture-backed tech leadership, fresh college students, and career managers who’ve never trip-planned a load or sat through a roadside inspection. They can read a margin. They can’t read a carrier. The vetting desk in this case wasn’t lazy, and it wasn’t corrupt. It was staffed and led by people who didn’t know what they didn’t know, inside a company whose owners were creditors, not truckers, and the safety function got run the way finance runs everything it doesn’t understand: outsourced to a software subscription or no one at all and never audited again. A load-management app built to collect electronic delivery signatures became, by default, the entire carrier safety program of a national carrier. Nobody decided that. Nobody was qualified to notice it had happened.

The man in the Sprinter was doing his job, in his lane, at the posted speed, and the sum of every unexamined decision in that chain was parked in front of him in the dark. Every party above that driver had the record in reach: the unrated status, the out-of-service rate, the insurance schedule that proved the carrier couldn’t haul the load, the OOS citation seventeen days out. Reasonable care in carrier selection means a person who knows the industry, looking at a public record, with the standing to say no. A software subscription doesn’t do that, and neither does a clause you paste into an agreement and never enforce. If the people running your carrier desk can’t explain what a satisfactory rating is without looking it up, you don’t have a vetting program. You have paperwork, and paperwork has never once stopped a truck. Vetting platforms are great if you have any idea what you’re looking at and what makes up a risk profile.

Who we’re hiring to run this industry top down and bottom up is what’s gotten us where we are today.

For most of my career, I would not take a plaintiff case. Twenty-five years behind the wheel, in the broker’s chair, in the fleet office, and on the witness stand, my answer to the lawyers suing truckers was no, because I came up in this industry and I was not going to be the guy who testified against it. This year I started saying yes, not because I changed sides but because I finally admitted the industry has two sides, and pretending otherwise was protecting the bad one. I have spent the years documenting carriers that reincarnate under their sister-in-law’s name while the NTSB investigation is still open, operators who run buses on another vehicle’s permit, companies that collected disaster loans on federal registrations younger than the eligibility deadline and fleets whose response to a driver caught with a video game open at 75 mph was a verbal warning. Somebody has to draw a line between that and the carrier who has run two million miles without a preventable, and if the people who love this industry will not draw it, the people who hate it will draw it for us, in courtrooms, with our collective industry reputation inside the circle.

So, draw it. What makes a good carrier, a good driver, a good industry? Who gets to decide? Everyone assumes the answer is obvious until you ask them to write it down, and then they hand you a CSA score, which is not an answer. It is an accounting.

Good is not the absence of violations

Start by clearing away what good is not, because the industry has spent thirty years confusing the floor with the standard.

The floor is real. Northwestern University’s crash research found that carriers rated unsatisfactory in federal audits crash 50% more than everyone else, so the compliance apparatus does identify something, but the inverse does not hold, and I have written thousands of words this year proving it. A carrier can hold a fresh Satisfactory rating and a 33% driver out-of-service rate at the same time. A carrier can keep a beautiful binder and put a fatigued driver in a coach on a 600-mile overnight. The rating measures the paperwork, the score measures the citations, and neither one measures the thing that actually predicts whether your family survives the encounter, which is what that company believes when nobody is checking. The bus that burned at Carrollton met every applicable federal standard on the books. Legal and inadequate at the same time. Compliance is what the law can demand. Good is what the law can’t reach.

That distinction matters because the worst operators in this industry are frequently compliant on paper, and increasingly, compliance on paper is their entire business model. The chameleon carrier is compliant; the clean DOT number is the product. The paper carrier is compliant; the instant-issue insurance certificate is the image. The Government Accountability Office found suspected chameleon carriers involved in severe crashes at three times the rate of compliant carriers, and every one of them had, at the moment of the crash, a filing on record and a number on the door. Bad does not usually announce itself with violations. Bad launders itself through the same forms good fills out honestly.

The root of good, and the number that proves it exists

If the paperwork cannot define good, what can? I think the root is older than the industry, older than the country, and everybody’s grandmother taught it to them: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. That sounds like a Sunday school answer until you operationalize it at 70 mph in 80,000 pounds, and then it turns out to be the most practical operating principle in transportation.

Courtesy is the Golden Rule at low speed. Situational awareness is the Golden Rule at high speed, because awareness is not a skill you possess; it is attention you spend, and you only spend it on things you care about. The driver who checks his mirrors for the motorcycle he saw two miles back is not exhibiting a technique. He is exhibiting concern for a stranger. Following distance is consideration of another person’s space. Showing up when you said you would is consideration of another person’s time. Doing the pre-trip when nobody is watching is consideration for people you will never meet, on a road you have not reached yet, who are trusting a stranger’s brakes with their children. Every professional behavior we train, measure, and reward is, underneath the acronym, a form of putting somebody else first.

The effect is measurable. Northwestern’s crash analysis found that private carriers, the fleets hauling their own company’s freight, crash 20% less than for-hire carriers. The researchers’ explanation was economic and honest: the cargo at risk is their own. Carriers demonstrably operate more carefully when the thing that would be destroyed belongs to them. Which means the entire definition of a good carrier reduces to one move: extending to other people’s cargo, other people’s schedules and other people’s lives the same care you would extend to your own. The good driver drives like everything in the next lane is his. The bad driver has decided none of it is, including, eventually, his own rig, his own license and his own name.

That is also where the consumer-versus-producer distinction my generation was raised on comes in. This industry keeps a society housed, fed, clothed, entertained, and supplied through every disaster it rebuilds from. That is a producer’s identity, and the best people in trucking are conscious of what they provide, not just what they collect. The worst actors run the identity in reverse. They extract. They consume the safety margin other drivers leave, the trust shippers extend, the wages their own drivers earned, the loan programs a country built for its emergencies, and the reputation two generations of professionals built one courtesy at a time. Good and bad in this industry are not personality types. They are directions. One puts more into the commons than it takes out. The other has calculated exactly how much it can take before something breaks, and has decided the something will not be theirs.

You get the behavior you pay for

If good were purely a matter of individual character, the fix would be a sermon, and I do not believe the fix is a sermon. Character operates inside economics, and the economics of this industry have been quietly manufacturing bad behavior for forty years.

Economist Michael Belzer, a former Teamster tank hauler who wrote “Sweatshops on Wheels,” has spent his career documenting what compensation does to safety, and the numbers are wild. In the study he and colleagues ran on J.B. Hunt’s 1997 pay raise, a 10% higher driver pay rate corresponded to a 34% lower monthly crash probability. Across non-union truckload carriers, 10% higher compensation tracked with a 9.2% lower crash rate. Paying drivers for their non-driving time, the detention and loading hours most of this industry still treats as free, measurably improves safety, because a driver paid by the mile with his waiting time confiscated is a driver whose economic survival depends on hurrying. We built a pay structure that fines patience and subsidizes recklessness, and then we hold safety meetings wondering where the recklessness comes from.

The same mechanism runs at the carrier level. Carriers riding non-underwritten insurance carry 16% more crashes. The cheapest capacity in the market is cheap because somebody removed a cost that was protecting you, the underwriter, the training, the maintenance interval, the driver’s wage, and the shipper who buys that capacity is purchasing the removal. This is the race to the bottom the economists warned about when the industry deregulated in 1980: when the buyer cannot tell good from bad, price wins, and the operator who cut the most corners quotes the lowest rate. Bad is not just a moral failure in this industry. Bad is a business model with a cost advantage, and it will outcompete good every single day that the people writing checks refuse to look past the rate.

Yet culture beats economics when somebody decides it will, which is the hopeful data point. When Virginia Tech’s Transportation Institute studied high-risk fleets that turned themselves around, the fleets that led with safety culture- the shared belief, top to bottom, that the person in the next lane matters more than the appointment- produced results that no technology purchase matches: one carrier cut preventable crashes 75.6%. Not with a gadget. With a decision about what kind of company it was going to be, enforced daily, from the owner down. The researchers found no single fix, because there is no single fix for character. There is only leadership that means it, expressed in hiring, training, dispatch, maintenance, and discipline until the meaning becomes the culture.

Who draws the line, and what winning looks like

So, who decides? Everyone who touches the freight, or nobody.

The government cannot do it alone; I have spent a year proving its ratings bless the binder. The market cannot do it alone; left to price, the market buys the corner-cutter. The line gets drawn the way lines have always been drawn in young industries, and make no mistake, at barely a century old, with half our carriers younger than a decade, we are still a young industry whose persona is still wet cement. It gets drawn by the people inside who decide the persona is worth defending.

That means shippers and brokers vetting past the score, because negligent selection verdicts have already established that the score was never a defense. It means carriers refusing freight priced below the cost of running it safely, and saying out loud why. It means drivers holding the standard in the parking lot and the fuel island, because every four-wheeler’s opinion of this industry was formed by the last truck they watched. It means paying for time, not just miles, because Belzer’s numbers say the pay stub is a safety device. It means journalists naming the worst operators specifically, with documents, which is what I do now. It means people like me taking the plaintiff case when the defendant earned it, because defending the best of this industry and refusing to prosecute the worst of it turned out to be the same job. I was slow to understand that. I am not slow anymore.

What does the outcome look like if we get it right? Not a utopia. An industry where the floor is the law and the ceiling is character, and everyone knows the difference. Where “professional driver” recovers the meaning it had when the public called us knights of the road and meant it. Where the carrier that does what it says shows up when it promised, pays for the time it uses, and drives like the next lane is family holds the cost advantage, because the buyers finally learned to price the difference. The Golden Rule, underwritten.

Good, in the end, is not complicated. It is just expensive, and the whole fight is over who pays: the operator who builds it into the rate, or the family that absorbs it on the highway. Every load in this country answers that question one way or the other. The good ones answer it before they turn the key.

The country is furious that a truck driver got four years and eight months for killing three people in California. In Virginia, a driver charged with killing three people got zero. The charges were nolle prossed, his license was untouched, and the only fact the court would confirm is that he needed a translator. We searched for more than 6,000 federal trucking lawsuits for the word interpreter. What we found, and what we didn’t, is the story.

Three people died on Interstate 81 in Roanoke County the week before Christmas. Lorraine Renee Williams, 65. Ebony Latasha Williams, 49. Shazziyah Lesley, 2, is properly secured in her car seat. Their minivan was stopped on the shoulder when a 2014 Volvo tractor-trailer ran off the road and hit it.

The driver, El Hadji Karamoko Ouattara of Montgomery Village, Maryland, was charged with reckless driving the next day. Six days later, the charges were upgraded to three counts of involuntary manslaughter. The same day, he was granted bond at a hearing that appeared nowhere on the public docket and walked out of the Roanoke County jail.

I asked the Roanoke County General District Court for the case records. They told me everything must be paid for in advance and mailed. My FOIA requests to Virginia State Police were denied twice, citing an active investigation into a crash on a public highway that was cleared within hours.

The clerk did later confirm that a translator was provided for his initial hearings. The case record I finally obtained confirms the rest. On February 12, the preliminary hearing was finalized, and the Commonwealth entered a nolle prosequi. The disposition form reads “With Prejudice: N.” The charges can be refiled anytime. Virginia has no statute of limitations on felonies, which also means nobody ever has to decide. As of this writing, nothing has been filed in circuit court.

The same form has a line for license consequences. It reads: Operator License Suspension Time, 00 Years, 00 Months, 000 Days. Without conviction, there is no CDL disqualification. Nothing in the licensing system prevents Ouattara from driving a truck tonight.

One more detail from that record. The defense attorney line reads Woods Rogers, one of the oldest and largest law firms in Virginia. Hourly truck drivers from Montgomery Village, Maryland, do not walk off the street and retain Woods Rogers. Somebody paid for that representation. The carrier he was driving for was DM Bowman. Trucking and logistics company headquartered in Williamsport, Maryland. Founded in 1959, the company is privately owned. Mr. Bowman has been heavily involved with trucking, trucking history, and trucking associations.

Three dead. Dropped charges. A translator. That’s the whole public record.

The California case

On Tuesday, a San Bernardino County judge sentenced Jashanpreet Singh to four years and eight months for the I-10 crash in Ontario that killed three people. The reaction was instant and national. Cabinet officials weighed in. The number was called an insult to three lives, and I understand why people feel that way.

Singh was arrested at the scene, held without bail, charged, prosecuted, convicted on his own guilty plea, and sentenced. He will serve prison time. His CDL is gone. The system ran from start to finish in under nine months. In Roanoke County, the system never left the driveway. No trial. No plea. No sentence. No license action. Zero days for three deaths. The outrage machine only sees the cases that reach a sentencing hearing. The scandal is the ones that never get there.

The numbers

I’ve been tracking enforcement of English Language Proficiency since the executive order restarted it last June. The roadside numbers are big and getting bigger.

In October, inspectors issued 6,455 ELP violations in a single month and placed 1,816 drivers out of service. Violations jumped from 1,399 in May to 3,925 in June when the revised CVSA out-of-service criteria took effect and peaked at 7,140 in September. Federal inspections alone accounted for 15,193 ELP-related enforcement actions through October. Texas led the nation with 7,090 violations while its own state law still prohibits requiring English proficiency for intrastate CDLs.

The regulation behind all of this is 49 CFR 391.11(b)(2). A CMV driver must read and speak English well enough to converse with the public, understand highway signs, respond to official inquiries, and fill out reports. Every carrier certifies it in every driver qualification file. Every one of those 6,455 violations is a certification that failed a test on the shoulder of a highway.

So we know the drivers are out there. We write them up by the thousands every month.

Now go look for them in the courtroom.

Then the crash

The criminal dockets tell you what the roadside numbers can’t. Right now, in at least six states, fatal truck crash prosecutions are running through interpreters.

In Florida, Harjinder Singh faces three counts of vehicular homicide for the U-turn crash that killed three people on the Turnpike. At his first appearance, he sat mostly unresponsive until an interpreter finally got a “that’s fine” out of him so the judge could appoint counsel. The judge’s bond denial had to be relayed to him through an interpreter. He now appears at routine docket calls by Zoom with a Punjabi interpreter at his side, and the case has been continued into 2026. Federal investigators administered an English proficiency assessment to him after the crash. He failed it on the verbal questions and on the highway signs.

In California, Jashanpreet Singh made his first appearance with an interpreter beside him, and court filings required a Punjabi interpreter at his hearings from arraignment through the guilty plea that ended the case Tuesday. The court that handled it, San Bernardino Superior, says on its website that if an interpreter is unavailable, the case may be delayed or continued until one can be assigned, and it acknowledges a statewide shortage of certified interpreters.

In Oregon, Rajinder Kumar is charged with manslaughter after a newlywed couple died when they hit his jackknifed rig on Highway 20. He appears on a closed-circuit camera with a Hindi interpreter. He postponed his plea by six weeks, waived his right to a speedy trial, and no trial date had been set.

In Wisconsin, the language barrier sat on the other side of the courtroom. Jorge Sanchez-Tzanahua is charged with killing a truck driver, Steven Nasholm, an owner-operator with a wife and three kids. When his sentencing was scheduled, the judge warned that the 90-minute hearing would take about half a day because of the time needed to translate between English and Spanish. Three dozen of Nasholm’s family and friends sat in that courtroom.

In Alabama, Andrii Dmyterko sat in the Clarke County jail for more than six months without a preliminary hearing after the Thomasville crash that killed two people. Not because of any legal dispute. Because the state’s one certified Ukrainian court interpreter was tied up on another case. The court finally appointed one in December at $120 an hour, paid from the State General Fund. The victims’ families waited on the same clock he did.

In Virginia, Oswaldo Martinez has been held for 21 years in the killing of 16-year-old Brittany Binger, never tried, because he is deaf, illiterate, and cannot communicate well enough to assist in his own defense. The commonwealth concedes he may never become competent. He sits in a state hospital on an endless six-month review cycle. That’s not a trucking case. It’s the ceiling on how long language can stall American justice.

The certification and the contradiction

Put the two halves side by side.

Every driver in every one of these cases holds a CDL. Every carrier that employed them certified, or should have, that the driver meets 391.11(b)(2). English proficient. Hired. Put on the road.

Then the crash happens, and a judge appoints an interpreter. That appointment order is a judicial finding that the carrier didn’t care enough to check. Nobody cross-references the two. FMCSA doesn’t collect interpreter appointments. Plaintiff lawyers stumble onto them one case at a time. The carrier’s DQ file and the court’s interpreter order sit in two filing systems that never meet.

When the criminal case stalls or dies, the way Dmyterko’s stalled for six months and Ouattara’s died in district court, the civil case idles behind it, the evidence goes stale, and the family waits.

We test English on the shoulder of Highway 6,000 times a month. Then someone dies, and the one institution that could make the finding stick treats the language barrier as a scheduling problem, writes it into a form nobody reads, seals it, or drops the case entirely.

The Williams family buried three generations on the week of Christmas. The court confirmed one fact about the man who was driving. He needed a translator. Then he went back to driving a truck.

The Department of Transportation published its 2026 unified regulatory agenda on July 7, over a year behind its normal schedule, and the trucking items on it run from a driverless-truck operating framework to whether a tractor needs a license-plate lamp while it’s towing a trailer. An agenda is a list of intentions with estimated dates attached, and the estimated dates on federal agendas slip the way delivery appointments slip, which is to say routinely and without apology. Some of these items have been “active” since before the iPhone had a front-facing camera. What the agenda actually tells you is where the agency believes its own machinery is broken, because an agency doesn’t open a rulemaking to fix something that works. Read that way, this agenda is a confession list: what each rule is, where it came from, why it’s surfacing now, and who gets hit when it lands.

The New Entrant Rule

Anyone with about $300 and an internet connection can register a trucking company with the federal government. That’s the new entrant problem at root, and the fix FMCSA is now considering, a proficiency examination before authority is granted, has been sitting in the agency’s files since a 2009 advance notice of proposed rulemaking. The docket is RIN 2126-AB17, it traces partly to a petition from Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, and the agenda now projects a supplemental proposal for November 2026. A safety question first formally asked in 2009 is scheduled to produce a proposal seventeen years later, and a proposal is not a rule.

A new applicant files an OP-1 or its Unified Registration System equivalent, certifies familiarity with the safety regulations by checking a box, and receives operating authority after a protest period. The government’s first real look at the operation comes afterward, in the form of a new entrant safety audit due within the first twelve months, and that audit is largely a records review. Nobody tests whether the applicant can identify an hours-of-service violation, calculate a bridge formula, or explain what a driver qualification file contains. The certification is self-certification. A checked box, in other words, and the box has no memory of who checked it last time.

That’s where the fraud economy lives. A carrier gets its authority revoked, its insurance canceled, or its safety record poisoned, and the same trucks, the same people, and the same freight reappear under a new DOT number with clean history. New paper over old iron. The industry calls that operator a chameleon carrier, and the regulatory term is reincarnation. The current new entrant process doesn’t just fail to catch these operators. It’s the front door they walk through, because the process asks nothing that a fraudulent applicant can’t answer with a self-cert checkbox. A proficiency exam won’t stop a determined chameleon on its own, and the industry doesn’t have to speculate about that, because the natural experiment has already run at the state level.

Minnesota requires carrier testing across every category the federal government uses to measure carrier behavior, the BASICs, and Minnesota is home to some of the worst-performing carriers in existence. The reason isn’t a mystery once you look at how the test is administered. It’s an online exam with no identity validation and no proctoring, so nobody can confirm that the person answering the questions is the one who’ll run the operation, and a cottage industry of compliance consultants sits ready to take the exam for whoever pays them. A test a proxy can pass measures the proxy. What an unproctored exam screens for is the applicant’s willingness to spend a few hundred dollars on a hired expert, and the fraudulent operator spends that money faster than the honest one, since to him the exam is just another document in the packet. None of that makes testing worthless. It makes unverified testing theater, and theater with a federal seal on it is worse than nothing, because it lets the agency tell Congress the gate exists. What a well-built exam does is raise the cost of entry, create a verifiable identity event at registration, and give investigators one more record to match against. Whether FMCSA pairs the exam with real identity verification, proctoring, and a tested person tied by name to the application is the question that decides whether this rule matters, and the agenda is silent on all three.

The pressure to move now is coming from two directions. Congress and the state licensing scandals of the past two years put non-domiciled CDL issuance and registration fraud on the front page, and the agency’s own new entrant call center contract drew scrutiny for what taxpayers were getting for the money.

The Registration System That Was Supposed to Exist in 2015

Congress ordered a single, consolidated federal registration system in MAP-21, the 2012 highway bill. It was called the Unified Registration System; it was supposed to replace the tangle of MC numbers, DOT numbers, and paper filings with one online front door, and its second phase has been suspended since 2017. Carriers registering today still interact with a hybrid of the old and the half-built new. The MC number, which FMCSA has been promising to retire for a decade, still governs how brokers and shippers identify authority. RIN 2126-AB56 is the agency’s plan to propose the remaining MAP-21 changes and, just as important, to codify its own procedures for granting, suspending, and revoking registrations. The agenda projects a proposal for July 2026, which is this month, so watch the Federal Register.

Codifying revocation procedure sounds like housekeeping. It isn’t. Registration is the chokepoint for every fraud pattern in this industry because every scheme needs an active DOT number, just as every business needs a bank account. Right now, the standards for suspending or revoking a registration exist partly in regulation and partly in agency practice, and practice is hard to litigate against and even harder to apply consistently. Written rules for who gets removed from the system and how would give the agency a faster, more defensible mechanism for pulling paper on operators who exist only on paper. The rule applies to brokers and freight forwarders too, not just carriers, and the broker side of the registration system is where double-brokering and identity theft problems are concentrated. If the proposal includes identity verification at registration, this becomes one of the most consequential items on the agenda. If it’s a fee-and-forms cleanup, it’s another decade of the same front door.

Safety Fitness: The Rating System Nobody Can Use

FMCSA sorts carriers into three ratings: satisfactory, conditional, and unsatisfactory. The framework dates to the late 1980s; it depends on the agency physically conducting a compliance review, and the agency has the capacity to review only a small fraction of the carrier population in any year. The result is that the overwhelming majority of the two million-plus entities in the registration system carry no rating at all, and among carriers that do have one, the rating may be decades old. I’ve taken apart the maintenance program of a carrier with a satisfactory rating and no open violations; the rating was 11 years old. It described a company that no longer existed in any operational sense. That’s what “satisfactory” can mean under the current rule: a snapshot from a prior ownership, a prior fleet, and a prior safety director, presented to the public as a current federal judgment.

The history is a graveyard. FMCSA tried to fix this in January 2016 with a proposed Safety Fitness Determination rule that would have replaced the three-tier system with a single “unfit” determination driven by roadside inspection data. Industry opposition and methodological criticism, including a 2014 GAO report questioning whether the underlying SMS percentiles reliably identified high-risk carriers, killed it, and the agency withdrew the proposal in March 2017. It came back with an advance notice in 2023 asking the same questions again: should ratings use inspection data, and should the three tiers survive? RIN 2126-AC52 now projects a proposed rule for November 2026, which would make it the third serious run at this problem in a decade.

The reason it’s back now is the Supreme Court’s decision in the Montgomery litigation ended the argument over whether brokers and shippers can be held to answer for the carriers they select, and the freight economy is now full of companies legally exposed for carrier selection with no usable federal fitness signal to select on. A conditional rating from 2013 is not a vetting tool. An unrated carrier is not a vetted carrier. The private market has been filling that vacuum with data products, mine among them, and the agency knows that a fitness system the public can’t rely on is a fitness system in name only. The open question the agenda doesn’t answer is whether FMCSA will rate carriers continuously from data or keep ratings tied to episodic reviews. That choice decides whether the rule fixes the problem or renames it.

ELD revisions

Congress mandated electronic logging devices in MAP-21; the FMCSA published the final rule in December 2015; and the industry reached full compliance in December 2017, with the grandfathered older recorders phased out by the end of 2019. The theory was that an electronic record would end the paper logbook fiction. The practice has been more complicated, and RIN 2126-AC50, which began with a 2022 advance notice and now projects a proposal for November 2026, is the agency’s attempt to absorb what eight years of field experience taught it.

The design flaw the revision has to confront is self-certification. Any vendor can register an ELD on FMCSA’s list by certifying that the device meets the technical specification. The agency doesn’t test devices before listing them. That structure produced a registry with hundreds of listed devices, a long tail of vendors nobody in the industry has heard of, and a periodic cycle of revocations when a device is finally examined and found non-compliant. Worse than the non-compliant devices are the compliant-looking ones built for fraud. I’ve investigated and continue to investigate ELD vendors whose product, as a practical matter, was log falsification as a service: edited driving time, ghost co-drivers absorbing hours, and support staff walking carriers through the edits. A device like that passes a roadside transfer test because the fraud is in the record-keeping upstream of the transfer. The falsification didn’t die with paper logs. It professionalized.

For carriers, a revision could clarify malfunction procedures, edit rules, and personal conveyance, which are the recurring compliance fights. For ELD providers, the stakes are existential. If FMCSA moves from self-certification toward third-party testing or agency certification, which is the direction its own lessons-learned record points, a meaningful share of the current registry doesn’t survive the transition, and every surviving vendor eats a re-certification cost. Fleets should think about vendor concentration risk now, because a carrier running a fringe device that gets revoked mid-rule has days, not quarters, to replace hardware across a fleet.

The Clearinghouse

The Drug and Alcohol Clearinghouse came out of a 2016 final rule and went live in January 2020, giving employers a central database of CDL driver violations and ending the era where a driver could fail a test at one carrier and hire on down the road the same month. The second phase, finalized in 2021 with a compliance date of November 18, 2024, connected the database to state licensing agencies so that a prohibited-status driver loses the CDL itself, not just the job. The population of drivers in prohibited status has run well into six figures since the system opened, and most of them never start the return-to-duty process. They didn’t evaporate. Some left the industry. Some are driving something that doesn’t require a CDL. Some are driving trucks anyway, for carriers that don’t query.

RIN 2126-AC43 projects a proposal for November 2026 aimed at getting more violation information into the system, streamlining processes, and aligning the Clearinghouse rules with the underlying testing regulations in Part 40. The agenda doesn’t name the specific gaps, but the field does. Owner-operators who are their own employer sit in a structural conflict, since the rule asks the violator to report the violation. Small-carrier queries are inconsistent. Test-cheating products remain a retail industry. If the proposal touches query obligations, reporting duties, or return-to-duty administration, every employer’s DOT testing program has revision work coming, and third-party administrators should expect their procedures to be part of the redesign.

Automatic Emergency Braking

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, signed in November 2021, ordered FMCSA and NHTSA to mandate automatic emergency braking on heavy trucks, and it gave them a deadline that has already passed. The agencies proposed the rule in July 2023, took heavy comment on performance standards, false-activation risk, and maintenance obligations, and now schedule a supplemental proposal for July 2026 under RIN 2126-AC49 and NHTSA’s companion, RIN 2127-AM36. A supplemental proposal at this stage means the agencies are reworking the performance requirements rather than finalizing them, which pushes any compliance date for new tractors further out.

AEB on a loaded combination vehicle isn’t AEB on a sedan. Radar and camera systems that phantom-brake an 80,000-pound vehicle in traffic create their own crash risk, and drivers who experience false activations start distrusting the system, which defeats it. The maintenance side matters just as much and gets less attention: the proposal contemplates motor carrier obligations to keep the systems functional, which means AEB faults become inspection items, out-of-service considerations, and maintenance-file entries. Fleets specing trucks today are already buying the hardware, since the major OEMs made AEB standard years ago. The rule converts an equipment feature into a compliance obligation, and the difference between those two things is who gets cited when the sensor fails.

AVs…

The safety regulations assume a human in the seat. Hours of service, drug testing, CDL standards, and the driving rules in Part 392 all regulate a person. An automated driving system has no hours to log, no urine to test, and no license to hold, and FMCSA has been circling the question of how to regulate its operation since listening sessions and a 2019 advance notice, followed by a second advance notice in 2023. RIN 2126-AC17 is designated a major rule, and the agenda projects the proposal for August 2026, which would make it the first comprehensive federal operating framework for driverless commercial trucks.

Driver qualification, testing, licensing, operation, equipment, and inspection and maintenance are all on the table. The stakes for the industry aren’t limited to the autonomy developers. The rule will decide questions such as who performs the pre-trip inspection on a driverless truck, what a roadside inspection of one looks like, and which entity holds the safety obligations a driver used to hold. States have been legislating in the vacuum, and a federal framework will preempt some of that patchwork and ratify the rest. Carriers who think this rule is about somebody else’s trucks should remember that the same docket will define remote-assistant roles and inspection duties that bleed into conventional operations. The technology has been hauling freight in Texas without a safety driver for over a year, and just this month, the FMCSA granted Aurora a waiver allowing its driverless trucks to satisfy the roadside warning-device requirement through alternative means. The regulation is arriving after the fact, which is the normal order of things and never the safe one.

ELDT Gets Two Rulemakings

Entry-level driver training took effect in February 2022 after a five-year delay: a federal curriculum, a Training Provider Registry, and a requirement that new CDL applicants train with a registered provider. The structural weakness was the same one the ELD rule has. Providers self-certify to the registry; tens of thousands did, and the registry became home to legitimate schools, one-truck training operations, and outright CDL mills that sold certificates. I’ve walked the field ends of that problem, and the distance between what the registry says a provider is and what’s happening on the training pad can be the width of the fraud.

The agenda answers that with two separate actions, and the second one is new. The first, RIN 2126-AC71, is an advance notice projected for November 2026, with a scope broader than its title suggests. FMCSA wants comment on additions to the training requirements, on the physical safety of women drivers and trainees, on reducing workplace sexual harassment, and on protecting vulnerable road users, meaning pedestrians and cyclists. The harassment piece deserves more attention than it will get. The team-training model puts a trainee in a sleeper cab with a stranger for weeks; the industry has known for decades what that arrangement produces, and the litigation record at the mega-carriers documents it. If the agency writes training-environment standards, carrier finishing programs and trainer-qualification practices become regulated territory for the first time.

The second action, RIN 2126-AD00, is a proposed rule to strengthen the standards for ELDT training providers themselves, including the possibility that providers would have to demonstrate ongoing compliance to remain listed rather than self-certifying once and disappearing from the registry. Read those two dockets together, and the direction is unmistakable. An agency asking how to improve training is an agency one step from asking why it lets anyone claim to provide it, and AD00 is that step. A registry with continuing-compliance obligations, audits, and delisting authority looks less like a directory and more like a licensing regime, which is what the certificate mills have never had to survive. Legitimate schools should welcome it and start building their documentation now, because the providers with real curricula, real ranges, and real instructor files are the ones a compliance regime protects.

The Deregulatory Batch

Nine final rules from the current deregulatory push are already in effect. Three of them touch daily paperwork. The ELD operator’s manual no longer has to ride in the cab, effective July 22, 2026, though the instruction sheet explaining data-transfer methods still does, and a driver who can’t produce and transfer records at roadside has a problem no manual ever solved (91 FR 37050). Electronic driver vehicle inspection reports are now expressly permitted under RIN 2126-AC89, which they functionally already were, and the value of the rule is that it removes the last excuse a paper-bound safety department had for not modernizing the defect-and-repair loop. Completed roadside inspection reports go back to the issuing state only if that state asks, effective July 22 under RIN 2126-AC90, and the part of that rule that didn’t change is the part that matters in litigation: the obligation to correct defects and certify repairs survives in full, and the inspection report in your file with an uncorrected defect and no certification is still the exhibit it always was.

The 95% fuel-tank fill restriction from 1973 is gone (RIN 2126-AC91), while the rest of the fuel-system design and leakage standards remain in place. Dual-status military technicians and civilian employees required to hold reserve membership now qualify for the military CDL exception (RIN 2126-AC92). Certain pre-2010 portable conveyors in aggregate operations get a conditioned exception from the all-wheel brake requirement (RIN 2126-AC93), small auxiliary tanks of five gallons or less feeding non-vehicle equipment get a fuel-feed exception (RIN 2126-AC94), tractors towing trailers no longer need a rear license-plate lamp (91 FR 7871), and the regulations now say plainly that tire sidewall load markings aren’t federally required (91 FR 7884). Each piece of equipment is an exception with conditions, not an exemption from the surrounding standards. The conditions live in the final rule text, not the press release, and a roadside inspector’s familiarity with a March 2026 exception is not guaranteed, so keep a copy of the applicable rule with the equipment file. More de-listing is queued behind these: the agenda carries final-stage actions to remove rear impact guard label requirements (RIN 2126-AC81) and the spare-fuse requirement (RIN 2126-AC83).

Three more housekeeping items are still upstream, and one of them isn’t housekeeping at all. A proposal targeted for November 2026 would thin the record-retention schedule in Appendix A to Part 379 (RIN 2126-AC16), and until it’s final, the existing retention periods still bind you, which matters because destroyed records with a live retention obligation become spoliation the day a crash turns into a lawsuit. A September 2026 proposal (RIN 2126-AC56) would harmonize the securement rule for tiered dressed lumber with Canada’s National Safety Code and replace the catch-all safe-operating-condition requirement for parts and accessories with specific violation provisions, which sounds technical and will quietly change what inspectors write, since a specific violation code is enforceable and appealable in ways a catch-all never was. The one final-stage item that hasn’t produced a final rule is the definition of “medical treatment” for accident reporting (RIN 2126-AC95), so the existing definition in 49 C.F.R. § 390.5T still controls what goes in your accident register, and getting that register wrong distorts your recordable-crash rate, which feeds your safety fitness picture, which is about to matter more than it has in forty years.

The Rest of the Docket

The agenda carries a second tier of items that didn’t make most of the coverage, and several of them will touch more operators than the marquee rules. Broker transparency is the loudest. OOIDA petitioned FMCSA in May 2020 to put teeth in 49 C.F.R. § 371.3, the regulation that has given carriers a right to see the broker’s transaction record since the ICC era, a right that broker contracts routinely waive away in the fine print. The agency published a proposed rule in November 2024 (RIN 2126-AC63, docket FMCSA-2023-0257); the docket drew roughly seven thousand comments, and the new agenda targets a supplemental proposal for this month. The fight is over whether transparency is a regulatory duty or a contractual right, because a right the broker can waive in its template agreement is functionally not a right at all. Whatever lands, small carriers running brokered freight should watch this docket the way brokers watched Montgomery.

The CDL system itself has four actions moving. The non-domiciled CDL restriction is furthest along: FMCSA already issued an interim final rule limiting when states can issue or renew non-domiciled CDLs, and the permanent final rule remains on the agenda (RIN 2126-AC98). A planned proposal on CDL security standards (RIN 2126-AD03) would tighten record retention and document verification at the state licensing agencies, which is the federal government reaching into the state DMV process after the licensing scandals proved the states weren’t policing it themselves. A proposal to codify English-language proficiency as an out-of-service criterion (RIN 2126-AC99) would move that enforcement push from policy memo to regulation, which makes it durable across administrations and litigable in a way a memo isn’t. A final-stage action would end the requirement that CDL holders self-report convictions to their home state (RIN 2126-AC85), a duty that existed mostly on paper anyway, since the state-to-state electronic conviction exchange now does the real work.

The remainder is a mix of relief and cleanup. A final-stage rulemaking would let certain drivers, school and passenger buses mostly, roll through highway-rail grade crossings equipped with active warning devices instead of stopping (RIN 2126-AC39). The agricultural commodity hours-of-service definitions from the 2020 interim rule are queued for a permanent final rule (RIN 2126-AC24). Emergency-declaration relief would revert from 14 days to 30 (RIN 2126-AC77), and the CDL information system would move to user fees (RIN 2126-AC78). Worth remembering what fell off the list entirely: the heavy-truck speed limiter rulemaking, a decade in the making, was canceled in June 2025 and doesn’t appear on this agenda at all. Rules die quieter than they’re born.

The Highway Bill

Surface transportation funding expires September 30. The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee ordered its reauthorization bill reported in May, the BUILD America 250 Act, H.R. 8870, and on July 1 the Congressional Research Service updated R48759, its commercial trucking issues report, the document committee staff actually work from when they need trucking explained fast. The rulemaking list above is the executive branch’s repair list. The highway bill is the legislative branch’s, and the two converge on the same broken layers of the same system.

Nearly every marquee rule on this agenda was born in a highway bill. MAP-21 ordered the ELD mandate and the Unified Registration System in 2012. The 2021 infrastructure law ordered the AEB rule and created the Truck Leasing Task Force. The agenda is FMCSA turning in homework from the last two bills, some of it late, since AEB blew a statutory deadline and the registration modernization is on year twenty-five. The next bill assigns new tasks to the same desk. Section 5101 of H.R. 8870 would direct DOT to define predatory lease-purchase programs and prohibit them by regulation within two years, with outcome recordkeeping and a mandatory disclosure form, an entire rulemaking that doesn’t appear on this agenda because the statute creating it doesn’t exist yet. The bill would also require an automated red-flag system inside Motus, the new registration platform, to screen suspicious registrant data at the front door. Count the roads to the same gate: a statutory red-flag screen, a proficiency exam proceeding, and a registration revocation rewrite are three separate answers to who gets a DOT number and how you take it away. Dalilah’s Law, H.R. 5688, would reach offshore dispatch and brokerage operations that commit fraud from outside the country, and section 7109 would establish a twenty-member cargo theft and freight fraud advisory committee. The chameleon carrier problem is named in the CRS report. So is the registration system’s inability to keep bad actors out.

Testimony season follows. Reauthorization hearings will put Secretary Duffy and Administrator Barrs at witness tables between now and conference, and the question lines write themselves because the documents generating them are already public. Why did the AEB rule miss a deadline Congress wrote into law, the one oversight sin with no partisan valence? Why are truckers struggling to use the new registration system, a difficulty CRS has now entered into the record, and why did a portal take a quarter century? Where is the broker transparency rule that every member with owner-operator mail in the district will ask for, and seven thousand comments in the docket guarantee the mail exists? What is the agency doing about carriers that shut down on Friday and reregister under new paper on Monday? Why can’t FMCSA say whether a $750,000 insurance minimum set in 1980 is adequate in 2026, and the honest answer, that settlement values hide behind NDAs and insurer data is proprietary, won’t satisfy the members carrying the $5 million bill. Every one of those is the same question in different clothes: Congress gave you mandates; where’s the delivery? The agency will sit at the table asking for new authority while being graded on the old, and how that goes decides which deadlines get hard-coded into the next bill instead of left to agenda estimates.

What Comes Next

Everything above is measured, on the agenda, linked, and datable. This section is my read. Active rulemakings side by side, and a pattern shows that no single docket announces. AB17 questions who gets into the industry. AB56 questions how registrations get revoked. AC52 questions how carriers get rated. AC50 questions whether the compliance record can be believed. AD00 questions whether the training credential means anything. Five separate dockets, one subject: the federal trust infrastructure of trucking, every layer of which the fraud economy has spent a decade exploiting in ways that finally became too visible to ignore. The agency isn’t writing twenty unrelated rules. It’s rebuilding the chain of custody regarding who is allowed to put eighty thousand pounds on a public road.

If that project keeps rolling downhill, the next dominoes are predictable. The ELD registry follows the training registry: once AD00 establishes that self-certification onto a federal list is a policy failure, the identical structure in the ELD rule can’t survive the comparison, and third-party device certification becomes a matter of when. Worth noting: Canada uses third-party certification, and the UK has only three approved tachograph manufacturers.

The fitness rule, if it moves to continuous, data-driven determinations, drags the SMS methodology fight back into rulemaking, because you can’t rate two million carriers based on inspection data without defending the math that GAO shredded in 2014. Downstream of all of it sits the broker-and-shipper side. The financial responsibility rule finished phasing in this January, the transparency proposal is due any day, and a Supreme Court decision has already told the freight economy that carrier selection carries legal consequence. A federal carrier-selection standard, the rule the brokerage industry has alternately demanded and dreaded for fifteen years, stops being hypothetical the day FMCSA finishes a fitness system worth relying on. If Congress hard-codes rulemaking deadlines in the reauthorization, as MAP-21 and the 2021 law did, the agenda dates above stop being estimates and become statutory obligations with attached oversight hearings. That’s the endgame this agenda is quietly building toward, whether the agency says so or not.

What to Do With All of This

Pull the operator’s manual language from your ELD document packet, keep the transfer instruction sheet, confirm that your DVIR process is documented, whether it’s paper or electronic, and update your procedure for returning inspection reports to reflect which states still require them. Anyone relying on the new equipment exceptions should keep a copy of the applicable final rule with the equipment file. Training providers should start their audit file before the audit exists. ELD vendors on the thin end of the registry should read AD00 as their own future.

The longer-term posture is different. Comment periods are the only point where an operator’s field experience enters the record, the dockets live at regulations.gov, and an agenda date is a promise the way a broker’s rate confirmation is a promise. The rules that matter here have been coming since 2009. What’s new is that the courts, the fraud, the data, and now the highway bill have all arrived at the same conclusion at the same time, and the agency is writing under pressure it didn’t have the last three times it tried.

The petitioners’ reply brief in Lujan v. FMCSA was due Wednesday, July 29. Final briefs and the deferred appendix are due August 5. Oral argument is set for September 15 before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, and when it ends, the court will decide whether the rule that took effect March 16, restricting non-domiciled CDL eligibility to H-2A, H-2B, and E-2 visa holders, survives on the merits. I’ve written about this rule three times since December, once about the court fight, once about why the final rule was a win worth defending, and once about the four problems it hands fleets. This is the fourth piece, and it’s about what actually gets decided in that courtroom, because most of what people think is at stake on September 15 already got decided in May, and most of what people think got decided in May didn’t.

The procedural history. FMCSA issued an interim final rule on September 29, 2025, published at 90 Fed. Reg. 46,509, effective immediately, on a good-cause theory that advance notice would trigger a surge of applications from drivers about to lose eligibility. The D.C. Circuit stayed it on November 10 and upgraded to a full emergency stay on November 13, finding the petitioners likely to succeed on at least three claims: FMCSA skipped the state consultation required under 49 U.S.C. § 31308, the good-cause justification didn’t hold, and the agency couldn’t articulate a net safety benefit when it conceded the displaced drivers would be replaced by less experienced ones. That was a loss, and it was an earned one. You don’t get to declare an emergency out of a problem you tolerated for twenty years and expect a federal court to nod along.

The agency asked for abeyance, went back, and did the consultation it had skipped. During the IFR comment period, FMCSA sent consultation letters to every state and got responses from eight state agencies and licensing authorities, AAMVA, and nineteen state attorneys general. It held a call with the state driver licensing agencies on October 2, 2025, and put the rule on the table at a CDL roundtable on November 4. Then it published a final rule on February 13, 2026, RIN 2126-AC98, Docket No. FMCSA-2025-0622, effective March 16, with a preamble that answers the comment record point by point, including the ones that hurt. The same petitioners, driver Jorge Rivera Lujan, asylum seeker Aleksei Semenovskii, AFSCME, and the AFT, with Public Citizen Litigation Group as counsel, filed their petition for review on February 12, the day before publication, docketed as No. 26-1032. King County, Washington, which runs non-domiciled CDL holders in its transit fleet, filed on March 4, No. 26-1046, and the clerk consolidated the cases the next day. Both moved for an emergency stay of the new rule.

On May 5, the same court that stopped the September version refused to stop the February version. Two judges to one, with Judge Robert Wilkins noting he would have granted the stay. The panel found the petitioners hadn’t shown a likelihood of success against the final rule, which means the panel found, at least preliminarily, that the agency cured the defects that killed the interim rule. Same agency, same court, same petitioners, opposite outcome, and the only variable that changed was the process. That’s the lesson, and it’s the one I argued for in February when people were telling me the final rule didn’t go far enough. Durable beats fast. The emergency declaration was fast. It’s dead. The final rule was slow. It’s in effect, and it has now survived the exact test its predecessor failed.

The rule itself hasn’t changed since I last walked through it, so I’ll keep it brief. Non-domiciled CDLs and CLPs are limited to holders of H-2A agricultural, H-2B seasonal non-agricultural, and E-2 treaty investor visas. Every applicant runs through SAVE, the federal immigration status verification system operated by USCIS, and presents an unexpired foreign passport with an unexpired I-94. EADs alone no longer qualify, which removes asylum seekers, asylees, refugees, DACA recipients, and TPS holders from eligibility, and renewals now happen in person. FMCSA’s analysis says about 97 percent of the roughly 200,000 current non-domiciled CDL holders won’t qualify at renewal, draining the pool by 30,000 to 40,000 drivers a year as credentials expire. Nobody gets pulled over and stripped of a card. The population ages out at the DMV counter, one renewal, transfer, upgrade, or reinstatement at a time.

The May 5 order tells you two members of one motions panel thought the petitioners were unlikely to win. The merits panel in September may be composed differently; it will have full briefing instead of emergency papers, and Wilkins’ position tells you at least one D.C. Circuit judge finds the petitioners’ argument persuasive. The petitioners’ theory is that FMCSA decided the outcome first and assembled reasons afterward, that the rule is arbitrary and capricious because the agency never produced data connecting domicile status to crash risk, and that it discriminates by immigration status without justification. Their anchor numbers come from the comment record itself: the five crashes FMCSA cited in the IFR were calculated by opponents at 0.13 percent of 2025 fatal truck crashes, and non-domiciled holders at roughly five percent of the CDL population. Those numbers were good enough to win a stay in November. Whether they’re good enough to win vacatur in September against a rebuilt record is the whole case.

The rebuilt record stops arguing crash statistics and attacks the premise that crash statistics were ever the point. The agency’s position is that the rule fixes a bifurcated vetting standard. A domestic applicant gets run through CDLIS and the Problem Driver Pointer System, so a suspension in Ohio follows him to Texas. A foreign-domiciled applicant’s driving history sits in databases no state can reach, and he doesn’t surrender his foreign license to get the U.S. credential, so the record the state can’t see runs both backward and forward: he can be driving on the foreign license in another country during the same years he holds the U.S. card. The three surviving visa categories were identified in consultation with the State Department and DHS because their consular vetting and interagency screening function as a proxy for the driver history check the states can’t perform. On the data, FMCSA concedes the count can never be complete, and explains why: MCMIS, FARS, and CDLIS have no field recording whether a license was non-domiciled, so the agency reviewed 2025 fatal crash reports manually, cross-referenced them with the licensing states, and counted only crashes where the non-domiciled CMV driver was at fault. That review found 17 fatal crashes in 2025 caused by non-domiciled holders, 30 people killed and more than 40 injured, with USCIS confirming a “substantial likelihood” that none of those drivers would have been eligible under the new rule, and the agency identified no at-fault fatal crash caused by a driver who would remain eligible. Most of the 17 drivers had held their initial CDL less than two years. Whether a merits panel accepts a hand-built illustrative sample in place of the statistical showing the November court demanded is, in my read, the question the whole argument turns on.

The amicus lineup filed over the past six weeks tells you this stopped being a trucking case somewhere along the way. Twenty-three states with Republican governors, Florida through West Virginia, filed for FMCSA last week, arguing the rule answers a string of preventable fatal crashes and that recent Supreme Court decisions leave states unable to police the problem alone. Their exhibit list opens with the Harjinder Singh crash, the illegal U-turn on a Florida highway by a driver licensed by California while in the country unlawfully, three dead in the passenger car. A comparable roster of states with Democratic governors filed for the petitioners, arguing the surviving visa categories are precisely the ones where federal screening surfaces unsafe driving history, so the state licensing function was never the failure point. The Teamsters and the Sikh Coalition are in as amici on the petitioners’ side, and the court warned everyone it views duplicative briefing in consolidated cases with disdain.

The Lujan case is also not the only federal action FMCSA is defending on the foreign-driver enforcement front, and the second one is a self-inflicted wound. On June 12, the Sikh Coalition sued FMCSA in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Case No. 1:26-cv-02099, and the suit isn’t about the non-domiciled rule at all. It’s a FOIA case about enforcement of English language proficiency. When the agency rescinded the 2016 ELP guidance and issued MC-SEE-2025-0001 on May 20, 2025, restoring out-of-service placement for violations of 49 CFR § 391.11(b)(2), it published the enforcement memo with the driver interview procedures, the interview question examples, and the highway sign assessment materials blacked out under FOIA exemption (b)(7)(E). The Sikh Coalition, which supports the ELP requirement on its face, filed a formal FOIA request on July 8, 2025, and was told the request was waiting in the queue; they sued to compel a determination under 5 U.S.C. § 552(a)(6)(A). ELP enforcement itself is running hard: Secretary Duffy posted in December that more than 9,500 drivers had been placed out of service under the standard, and 2025 MCMIS data in the complaint shows over 49,000 ELP-coded violations across the four violation codes. I support that enforcement.

For fleets, nothing about September 15 changes the operating posture I described in March, and waiting for the ruling to act is still the losing play. The rule is in effect. State licensing agencies are processing renewals under it right now. A driver holding a non-domiciled CDL keeps operating until the next licensing transaction, and that transaction- renewal, transfer, upgrade, replacement, or reinstatement- is where eligibility gets retested. If the court vacates the rule this fall, drivers terminated in the interim become a wrongful-termination question. If the court upholds it, drivers retained without eligibility review become the negligent-retention exhibit in the next crash case. The answer to both is the same file: audit the driver qualification files now, document the visa category and SAVE verification for every non-domiciled credential in the fleet, get employment counsel’s read on termination exposure and safety counsel’s read on retention exposure, and make the decision in writing either way. The carriers who did that in March are done. The ones who didn’t have six weeks before argument.

The agency wins more of this case than it loses. The November stay turned on process defects the agency has since cured, the May panel said so out loud, and appellate courts do not lightly vacate a rule the same circuit declined to stay on a fully argued emergency motion. The petitioners’ strongest ground remains the data, and the agency’s answer is now on the record: this was never a crash-rate regulation, it’s a verification regulation, the databases that would prove or disprove the statistical case don’t record the variable, and courts give agencies room to fix a licensing system that 28 cited jurisdictions demonstrably broke. The open question worth watching at argument is whether the panel makes FMCSA answer the one question from November it still handles by reframing rather than by evidence: how a rule that swaps experienced drivers for less experienced ones produces a net safety gain. If FMCSA has a good answer on September 15, this fight is over. If it doesn’t, we’re doing this a third time.

A driver who should never have been behind the wheel of a commercial vehicle put me in a hospital for the better part of a year, so I don’t come to this rule neutral, and I’ve never claimed to. What I claim is that the record now in front of the D.C. Circuit was built the right way, by an agency that lost on process, took the loss, and did the work. The FOIA case shows what happens when it forgets that lesson. Whatever happens on September 15, the February rulemaking is the version of federal regulation this industry should want more of, and the redacted ELP memo is the version it should want less of, and both are sitting in Washington courtrooms right now to prove the difference matters.

Seldom is what you see what you get in the Chicago trucking world. I’ve been covering the Domilea.com Viava Grama authority sales for some time, but I fell in love with the story when she sold Alexander Mimic’s/Super Ego’s co-debtor entity, “Timeit,” for $35k in April via Telegram chat. Some were even Sam Express affiliated. (For the list of those she listed and supposedly sold on Domilea, you can find those here.) The entity data changed, but Alexander and Super Ego remained the co-debtors; the UCC lien went nowhere. Maybe it’s my unhealthy focus on Alexander Mimic’s Super Ego, and that crazy that also led to my CBS 60 Minutes deal. Maybe it’s the 33 entities she sold in April alone or the $1.5M she made selling more trucking authorities that often turn out to be repurposed on the market as shells for aspiring chameleon carriers and bad lease deals.

To my surprise, Viava Grama, the name behind the Telegram chat channel and Domilea.com, decided that Instagram was her next-best hustle. Blondes and boobs=influence. truckercollege.com is her newest venture spinoff from that influence. Tell the world how she built a trucking company and how they can do it too. Well, there's a story there, and it’s very different than the one she tells on Instagram. It is a very common story where drivers, vendors, lenders, and ultimately the rest of the industry and the public absorb losses from failed companies.

She even had a “Buy CDL Driver” Telegram channel where she posted drivers’ licenses, Social Security numbers, and other PII and sold them. Many non-domiciled CDLs. Basically a Truck driver Tinder feed with all their personal data in a Telegram feed. This went on for months until someone tipped off Telegram to the terms of service violation, but we scrolled and recorded the entire feed weekly. It’s all a big game that costs all of us as an industry and as a society. You could buy Salvador Garcia here for right at $600. Entire driver file basically in the Telegram channel. Need team or ghost drivers for your ELD…we got you.

So where did Grama come from? What got her here? Who is she? Is she Maria, Viava, Sandra, or what? Well, here's the shortest long version of how we got here.

On March 14, 2025, a lender named Auxilior Capital Partners filed a verified complaint in the Northern District of Illinois, alleging it couldn’t locate its own trucks. The filing states that the equipment sits at 13717 South Route 30, Suite 111, in Plainfield, that the borrowers are “wrongfully and unlawfully detaining” it, and that Auxilior “has been unable to secure the Equipment by peaceful means.” A vice president of portfolio management, Dominick Cevet, signed the verification two days earlier under penalty of perjury. The company asked a federal judge for a writ of replevin and for authority to break locks.

Eleven days later, a 2022 Utility reefer trailer with VIN 3UTVS2536N8719109, one of the twenty-nine units on that loan, underwent a roadside inspection. Over the following ten weeks, six more of those units were inspected in Utah, Mississippi, and Illinois, as well as along an Arkansas-to-Wyoming corridor. All seven ran under the USDOT number of a carrier that appears nowhere in the loan agreement, nowhere in the guaranty, nowhere on the UCC-1, and nowhere in the lawsuit.

The trucks weren’t hiding in a lot in Plainfield. They were working.

What actually got built

So how do Domilea, Trucker College, and Viava Grama of Instagram “How I built a multimillion dollar trucking entity and got rich” Instagram fame fit into this typical EuroChicago leasing craziness? They don’t directly, but they didn’t just materialize. His “trucking success story started somewhere, and this is it. We’re going to tell you how she really built a trucking company. We won’t charge you for a class. It’s all free unless you want to pay to subscribe. RTL Leasing, LLC is the borrower on that loan. Illinois file number 09786732, organized January 27, 2021, principal address 13717 U.S. Route 30 in Plainfield. It has two managers on the state filing, Vaiva Grama and Jake Kuenzl, and Kuenzl took over as registered agent on August 20, 2024. It has never held a USDOT number. It has never held operating authority. It has never been party to a roadside inspection because a leasing entity doesn’t haul anything yet controls everything, and that’s the story on leases and largely part of the reason they fail.

On July 11, 2025, the Illinois Secretary of State dissolved it. The status field reads INVOLUNTARY DISSOLUTION. Nobody wound down the company, closed the books, or filed articles of dissolution. Somebody stopped paying the annual report fee, and the state took the entity off the board for it. A company that borrowed $2,113,122.29 was terminated over a filing that cost $75.

The operating carrier is a separate company in a separate state. Reserve Truck Lines Ltd. Co., an Iowa corporation at 222 3rd Ave SE, Suite 504, Number 18, in Cedar Rapids, USDOT 3175112, carrying federal operating authority roughly eight years old. Kuenzl signed the corporate guaranty on its behalf as sole member. Reserve still has a DOT number but no authority; twenty power units on file. Its last recorded roadside inspection was January 13, 2025.

The titled owner is a third company, and it was dead the entire time. Every one of the twenty-nine certificates of title in the exhibits reads “MERGING EXPRESS LLC, 1110 Manhattan Road, Joliet,” with Auxilior recorded as the first lienholder. Auxilior’s own complaint concedes, at paragraph 16, that RTL never obtained new titles, so the titles still identify Merging Express as the owner. Merging Express had ceased operations and liquidated before the loan closed.

That is the structure, and it repeats across dozens of these cases. The debt lives in one entity, the operating authority lives in a second, the title lives in a third, and the equipment moves freely among all of them, often under common control, while declaring it was a rich leasing company. A broker vetting the load sees the carrier. An insurer underwriting the risk sees the carrier. A lender underwriting the collateral sees the leasing entity and the title. Nobody sees the whole thing, and that isn’t a flaw in the arrangement. That’s what the arrangement is for.

The paper

Auxilior didn’t lend into this cold. Auxilior financed the equipment for Merging Express; Merging Express told Auxilior it had subleased that equipment to RTL Leasing; Merging Express then ceased operations and liquidated, Auxilior foreclosed, and RTL was sitting on the iron when the music stopped. Rather than send trucks and a recovery agent to pull twenty-nine units out of a yard, Auxilior wrote a new loan to the party already holding the keys.

Auxilior wrote $2,113,122.29 at 4.90 percent on July 26, 2024. The Wall Street Journal prime rate that day was 8.50 percent. A finance company with no deposits, funding itself through warehouse lines and the equipment asset-backed securities market, wrote paper more than three and a half points below prime to a borrower with no operating history, no authority, and no trucks of its own. Nobody does that for a customer they like. They do it when the alternative is booking the loss on the last borrower this quarter.

Five months later, it got worse on paper and better on the books. On December 30, 2024, the last business day of the year, Auxilior and RTL executed an amendment restating the payment schedule from the beginning. The new schedule opens with four monthly payments of $0.00 running September 15 through December 15, 2024, months that had already come and gone. One payment of $12,883.44. Five interest-only payments of $8,772.77. Six at $15,000. Twelve at $30,000. Thirty-six at $45,000. One final balloon of $400,632.70. A loan four payments delinquent became current with one signature, retroactively.

The amortization schedule attached to the complaint, December 31, shows what those zero-dollar months actually did. Interest accrued of $35,310.99. Principal applied of negative $35,310.99. The balance climbed from $2,113,122.29 to $2,148,433.28, then remained flat through six interest-only payments. The first dollar of principal reduction on the schedule falls on payment eleven, July 15, 2025, and it’s $6,227.23. For the first year of a loan on 2017-through-2022 iron, Auxilior’s exposure was scheduled to sit above where it started while the collateral depreciated underneath it. The complaint puts the fair market value of all twenty-nine units at $1,100,000.

RTL missed the January 15, 2025 payment and every payment after it. Total cash Auxilior collected on $2.1 million: none. That’s not a borrower who defaulted six months in. Under the schedule Auxilior itself drafted, nothing was owed until January, and January is when it stopped. Basically, they got handed a fleet they wouldn’t have to pay for over months. They ran the trucks. Collected a bunch of cash flow. Then made no payments ever on the equipment. Moved on. That’s how you build a successful Chicago lease-all, debt-zero, cost-trucking company while pocketing all the proceeds under an entity you simply close and reopen. Wash. Rinse. Repat. Go on Instagram and tell the world how to build such a successful operation. Should be everyone’s life mission.

Charleston

The reason Merging Express liquidated runs through a federal court in West Virginia, and the publicly available part is a settlement notice.

On March 10, 2025, a mediator named Charles S. Piccirillo convened the parties in Amy Young, as Administratrix of the Estate of Hans Robinson v. Star Insurance Company, Civil Action No. 2:24-CV-00240 in the Southern District of West Virginia. His letter to Judge Joseph R. Goodwin the next day reports a full and final confidential settlement, contingent on the court’s approval of the wrongful death distribution. Six related cases were swept in with it, including four personal injury actions against a driver named Walky Occeus and a carrier called Tesla Cargo Solutions, Inc., as well as Star’s own declaratory action against Transport Enterprise Leasing, LLC.

Merging Express, LLC is named in that declaratory action, No. 2:24-cv-00363, alongside Transport Enterprise Leasing, Tesla Cargo, Occeus, and the individual claimants. A seventh case, Star Insurance Company v. Merging Express, et al., No. 2:24-cv-00706, was held open while Star pursued default judgment against defendants who had already defaulted. It was dismissed by judgment order on April 2, 2025.

What the record says is narrow. Merging Express was a respondent in an insurance coverage proceeding arising out of litigation over a man’s death, and it didn’t appear to defend itself. Whether its truck was in that crash, whether it was a claimant, whether it was a co-insured with an interest in the same policy limits.

The sequence, though, is fixed. Star filed against Merging Express on December 9, 2024. Auxilior restructured the RTL loan twenty-one days later. RTL defaulted sixteen days after that. Auxilior filed for replevin on March 14, and Star’s case against Merging Express was dismissed on April 2. Two federal courts in two states spent the first quarter of 2025 chasing the same collapsed company from opposite ends.

Where the iron went

Twenty-nine units, twelve tractors and seventeen trailers, all titled to a dead company in Joliet. The inspection record picks up eleven of them.

Seven ran under Trans Alps Carrier LLC, an Illinois company organized February 3, 2023, at 310 North Hammes Avenue in Joliet, whose sole manager and organizer of record is Rolando Alvarez. That carrier operates a fifty-nine-unit fleet. The seven collateral units carry Illinois plates ZP89808 on a 2020 Freightliner, P118486 on a second 2020 Freightliner, P1182506 on a 2020 Volvo, 877883ST and 846405ST on trailers, plus an Indiana plate P1120376 on a 2019 Volvo and a Maine plate 877885ST on a 2022 reefer whose sequential sibling is registered in Illinois.

Two of the twenty-nine ran under Reserve, the guarantor. One of those, a 2020 Freightliner carrying VIN 3AKJHHDR8LSLR1516, appears under Reserve on January 13, 2025, two days before the missed payment, and under Trans Alps from December 3, 2024 forward. Reserve and Trans Alps share six more VINs beyond the Auxilior collateral. Six shared power units and trailers between two companies, with no corporate relationship on any filing, aren’t equipment churn. That’s a shared fleet.

There’s a trailer in the Trans Alps fleet that isn’t on the loan and should be. VIN 1GR1A0625LB169309, a 2020 Great Dane on Illinois plate 947320, inspected in Utah on November 1, 2024. Auxilior’s Schedule A covers Great Dane serial numbers 169306, 169307, 169308, and 169310. Serial 169309 sits in the middle of that block. Same year, same make, same batch, and it’s the one unit of five that didn’t end up on the lien.

From mid-2025 forward, the fleet scattered. A 2020 Freightliner shows up under a carrier in Ontario, California, in March 2026, and another in Dayton, Ohio, in May. A Great Dane reefer surfaces in Hialeah, Florida. A 2017 Wabash runs four inspections under a carrier in McAllen, Texas. Two Volvos land with a carrier in Adamsville, Tennessee. A reefer moves to a carrier in Bolingbrook, Illinois, eleven miles from where the whole thing started.

What it cost, and who paid

Run the ledger on this one deal, and every party on it absorbed something, except for the equipment.

A family in West Virginia lost Hans Robinson, and his estate settled its claims eighteen months later under terms nobody outside the case will ever see. Star Insurance paid into a wrongful death settlement and went hunting for a default judgment against a company that had already ceased to exist. Merging Express liquidated. Auxilior wrote $2.1 million, collected zero, forgave four months of it after the fact, and sued for $2,173,343 plus eighteen percent contract interest against collateral it valued at $1.1 million in its own pleading. In an asset-backed securities structure, that gap doesn’t stop at the originator. It runs to the noteholders. RTL Leasing was terminated by the State of Illinois over an unfiled annual report.

The drivers who turned the wheels on those twenty-nine units appear in none of these records. Not in the loan file, not in the guaranty, not in the titles, not in the pleadings. The only trace any of them left is a roadside inspection with a VIN on it, and the only reason we can follow this equipment at all is that a state trooper wrote down that number.

Every corner of the arrangement took a loss. The iron didn’t. Those trucks and trailers have been earning revenue continuously since 2022, through a liquidation, a wrongful death settlement, a foreclosure, a refinance, a restructure, a default, a replevin action, and an involuntary dissolution, under at least eight different USDOT numbers in eight states. Nothing shut down. The paper died, and the equipment kept working.

The gap

Lease agreements aren’t public. FMCSA doesn’t collect equipment ownership. State titles lag the real world by months or years, and in this case they pointed at a company that had already liquidated for the entire life of the loan. The only public instrument that ties a specific truck to the company actually running it is a roadside inspection record, and inspections happen when they happen.

That’s why nobody caught this for two years, and it’s why the next one won’t get caught either. A broker running a carrier through a vetting platform sees the authority. It doesn’t see the note, the guarantor, the title, or the four other companies that have been in those trucks.

Somebody had to pull the VINs by hand because while the folks who built and ran these companies might just show up on your Instagram feed selling you trash authorities, they’re also telling you how to start a trucking company, just like they did. A trucking company just like many others in the Eurochicago market, one that costs everyone else everything and costs them nothing.

At the end of the day, this costs the industry. It costs real drivers with real families. It costs insurers. It costs lives. These operations cost legitimate operators, and consumers absorbed costs, increased regulatory focus, and legitimacy. That's why focus on these operational histories matters.

(I use Thackray Crane as a prime example here because the day I was with them loading this at their yard in Philly, executive management was there in vests and hard hats to ensure the load they were shipping for a client on their truck was loaded and secured properly.) Top-down leadership is leadership that understands risk and the hierarchy that says you can't delegate your safety responsibilities. Second, notice their equipment. It doesn’t have to be show room Pete to be well kept and maintained. Pride goes a long way in selection, vetting, and even enforcement.)

Counsel asks who selected the motor carrier that crashed into their client, and the corporate designee says some version of: we hired a broker, carrier selection is the broker’s job, we don’t control who they put on our freight. In the shipper’s mind, the freight left the dock, and the responsibility left with it. What they’re describing is delegation, and delegation is real. What they’re claiming is that delegation erased their accountability, and that claim runs against how safety responsibility has always worked in this industry, from the driver’s seat on up.

The bottom is where the rule is oldest and clearest.

The driver can’t delegate securement, even when someone else loaded the trailer.

A driver backs under a preloaded trailer at a shipper’s dock. Warehouse crew loaded it, maybe hours ago, maybe with a forklift operator the driver never saw. The driver still owns what happens next. 49 CFR 392.9(a) says a driver may not operate a commercial motor vehicle unless the cargo is properly distributed and adequately secured under the securement standards at 49 CFR 393.100 through 393.136, and the driver must assure himself of that before pulling out and again within the first 50 miles. The regulation doesn’t ask who did the loading. It asks who decided to put that load on a public highway, and the person who makes that decision is the person holding the steering wheel. There’s one carve-out, at 392.9(b)(4), for sealed loads the driver has been ordered not to open and loads packed in a way that makes inspection impracticable. The carve-out exists because the default rule is that securement responsibility rides in the cab.

The case law behind this is older than me. In United States v. Savage Truck Line, Inc., 238 F.2d 145 (4th Cir. 1956), a Navy-loaded airplane engine broke loose from a Savage truck and killed a man, and the Fourth Circuit had to sort out who owed what when the shipper did the loading. The court put the primary duty on the carrier: the carrier accepts the load, the carrier’s driver has the chance to see the defect, the carrier answers for it. The shipper is on the hook only when the loading defect is latent, hidden from the carrier’s reasonable inspection but known to the shipper. Seventy years later, courts still call it the Savage rule, and every securement case I’ve worked starts there. Notice the structure repeats all the way up the chain: the party closer to the risk carries the duty, and handing the physical task to someone else doesn’t hand off the duty unless you genuinely couldn’t have seen the problem.

The carrier’s non-delegable core

The motor carrier sits one tier up, and its non-delegable duties are written into the regs. The clearest example is the leasing rule. When a carrier pulls freight with an owner-operator’s truck, 49 CFR 376.12(c)(1) requires the lease to grant the carrier exclusive possession, control, and use of the equipment and to state that the carrier assumes complete responsibility for its operation for the duration of the lease. That regulation exists because carriers spent decades pointing at the owner-operator after a crash and saying he’s an independent businessman, not ours. The government’s answer was to make responsibility a condition of using the equipment at all. You can lease the truck. You can’t lease out the accountability that comes with running it under your authority.

The same principle runs through the rest of Part 390 and its neighbors. Under 49 CFR 390.11, whenever a duty is prescribed for a driver, the motor carrier must require its driver to observe it. Under 390.13, nobody may aid, abet, encourage, or require a violation. The driver qualification file requirements in Part 391, the drug and alcohol program in Part 382, and the maintenance and inspection duties in Part 396: a carrier can hire a compliance service to build the files, a third-party administrator to run the testing consortium, and a vendor shop to turn the wrenches, and I’ve audited carriers that outsourced all three. Outsourcing the function is legal and often smart. When FMCSA shows up for a compliance review, the party answering for the gaps is the carrier whose DOT number is on the door. In twenty-five-plus years, I have never once seen an enforcement action or a verdict land on the compliance vendor instead of the carrier. The work was delegable. The duty wasn’t.

Restatement (Second) of Torts §428 says that a party operating under a public franchise, an authority granted by the government to do something that involves an unreasonable risk of harm unless carefully done, can’t shed the duties that come with the franchise by hiring an independent contractor. Interstate motor carrier authority is exactly that kind of franchise, and §428 is one of the reasons the leased-driver defense died. The franchise carries the duty. The duty stays with the franchise holder.

Montgomery closed the broker’s escape hatch

For about fifteen years, the fight over the next tier up was a preemption fight. Brokers argued that the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act, 49 U.S.C. 14501(c)(1), preempted state negligent-selection claims because carrier selection relates to a broker’s services, and the circuits split over whether the safety exception at 14501(c)(2)(A) saved those claims. The Ninth Circuit said the claims survive, in Miller v. C.H. Robinson Worldwide, 976 F.3d 1016 (9th Cir. 2020). The Seventh went the other way in Ye v. GlobalTranz Enterprises, 74 F.4th 453 (7th Cir. 2023), and the Eleventh sided with the Seventh in Aspen American Insurance Co. v. Landstar Ranger, 65 F.4th 1261 (11th Cir. 2023). For a while, whether a family could sue the broker depended on which side of a state line the truck happened to crash on.

That era ended on May 14, 2026. Montgomery v. Caribe Transport reached the Supreme Court on facts that were almost embarrassing in their simplicity. Caribe Transport II held a conditional safety rating when C.H. Robinson tendered it a load of plastic pots. Conditional is not a secret. Shawn Montgomery was stopped on the shoulder of Interstate 70 in Illinois on December 7, 2017, when that carrier’s truck hit him, and he lost his leg. The Court held that a negligent-selection claim is a safety regulation of motor vehicles within the plain meaning of 14501(c)(2)(A), and that whether pulling the public record was worth ninety seconds is a question for a jury. The preemption wall came down nationwide that morning. Brokers had already been losing this argument on other grounds for years; Schramm v. Foster, 341 F. Supp. 2d 536 (D. Md. 2004), recognized a broker’s duty of reasonable care in carrier selection two decades earlier, and Sperl v. C.H. Robinson Worldwide, 408 Ill. App. 3d 1051 (2011), showed what happens when a broker’s control over the load crosses into agency. Montgomery didn’t invent broker accountability. It removed the federal shield that let brokers avoid litigating it.

The doctrinal engine underneath all of these cases is Restatement (Second) of Torts §411: a party that hires a contractor owes reasonable care to select a competent and careful one, measured against the danger of the work. Hauling 80,000 pounds on a public highway qualifies as dangerous work under any reading. Section 411 attaches to the act of hiring. The duty attaches to the act of hiring, whoever performs it, at whatever tier.

The shipper’s move, and why it doesn’t work

The shipper says: we hired a broker, so carrier selection and carrier vetting belong to the broker. As a description of who performs the vetting, that’s usually accurate. As a theory of who’s accountable, it quietly assumes that §411 evaporates at the shipping dock, and it doesn’t. The shipper made a hiring decision. The shipper selected the broker. The selection of the broker is the shipper’s own conduct, performed by the shipper’s own people, under the shipper’s own procurement process, and the question a jury gets to ask is the same one it asks at every other tier: was that selection reasonable, given the danger of the work being sourced?

The idea that shippers are strangers to safety duties doesn’t survive contact with the regulations they already live under. A shipper offering hazardous materials for transportation carries duties that no contract can move. Under 49 CFR 173.22, the shipper is responsible for proper classification, packaging, and marking, and under 172.204(a) the shipper personally certifies on the shipping paper that the materials are offered in accordance with the regulations. No shipper of drummed solvent has ever successfully told PHMSA that classification was the broker’s problem. The regulatory system already treats the party who puts freight into the stream of commerce as a party with safety obligations. The only question is how far those obligations reach into carrier sourcing, and that’s where the current litigation lives.

The counterweight is in re Home Depot U.S.A., Inc., 69 Tex. Sup. Ct. J. 721 (2026), the Texas Supreme Court held that a passive shipper of ordinary goods, one that exercises no control over the carrier’s operations, equipment, or employees, where the cargo presents no unusual risk, can’t be held liable just for shipping. The court said the plaintiffs’ theory transformed the commonplace act of shipping goods into sweeping tort liability untethered from control, conduct, and risk. That holding is correct as far as it goes, but. It doesn’t address a shipper that owns the trailers, holds its own motor carrier authority, runs a transportation subsidiary, writes safety standards into its broker contracts, or ships at a volume that generates its own carrier-safety data exposure. The distance between a passive shipper and a sophisticated transportation participant is a factual distance, and most of the national shippers I see in litigation are on the sophisticated end of it. A company that knows enough about vetting to require it in Section 8 of its broker agreement knows enough to check whether it’s happening.

The hierarchy

Here’s the structure. The driver vets the load and the equipment before putting them on the highway. That duty is regulatory and personal. The carrier vets the driver, the equipment, and its own compliance systems. That duty rides with the operating authority and can’t be leased, outsourced, or contracted away. The broker vets the carrier. That duty is now litigated in front of juries in all fifty states, and the reasonableness of the screen is the whole case. The shipper vets the broker. That duty is the newest one on the board in terms of litigation attention, and it’s the oldest one in terms of doctrine, because it’s nothing more than §411 applied to the hiring the shipper actually performed.

Each tier delegates performance downward. No tier delegates accountability downward. The reason this matters is, if your freight ends up on an unfit truck, somebody at every tier above that truck made a sourcing decision that let it happen, and the law is done pretending only one of those decisions counts.

What vetting the broker actually looks like

Since the shipper’s duty is the one the industry hasn’t built habits around, here’s what the practice looks like when it’s done, drawn from programs I’ve built and programs I’ve torn apart. Verify the broker’s authority and its surety bond. Every property broker must maintain a $75,000 bond or trust under 49 U.S.C. 13906(b), the BMC-84 or BMC-85 on file with FMCSA, and the filing history is public; a broker that has cycled bond providers or had a bond cancellation is telling you something. Ask for the broker’s carrier-vetting criteria in writing, and read them the way you’d read anything you might have to defend under oath, because you might. A screen that checks only active authority and an insurance filing is a status check. A status check tells you the carrier exists on paper. It tells you almost nothing about whether the carrier will crash. Ask what the broker does about double brokering, because a load that gets double-brokered lands on a truck nobody in your chain ever looked at, and the detection controls, matching the DOT number on the tractor at pickup against the tendered carrier, tying tracking to the actual asset, verifying the driver’s carrier affiliation, are cheap and checkable. Put minimum carrier standards in the broker agreement, then audit against them on a schedule, because a contract clause you never verify is a requirement you wrote and a duty you skipped. Look at the lawsuits the broker has faced before. Look at the carriers the broker has selected before. All of that data is available and free. Keep the records. The whole point of a vetting program, at any tier, is that when the worst day comes, you can prove what you knew, what you checked, and when you checked it.

The defendants who survive these cases aren’t the ones who found a party below them to point at. They’re the ones who can produce a dated record showing they did their own tier’s work. The chain of freight is a chain of hiring, vetting, and sourcing decisions, and every link answers for its own.

There’s an old line from the yard that fits the moment. The cheapest carrier on the board is the mistress, and the safe carrier is the wife. The mistress looks like the bargain on the rate confirmation and takes everything you have when it goes wrong. The marriage you’re actually in, the one that costs more every single month, was the cheaper deal the whole time. Brokers and shippers spent ten years chasing the rate confirmation mistress; now they want their wife back, but now shes demanding more money. A Court told them the crash is theirs too, and the market is already charging them for the difference.

On May 14, 2026 the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that a broker who negligently hires an unsafe carrier can be sued, because the claim falls inside the safety exception to the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act, 49 U.S.C. 14501(c). Justice Barrett wrote for a unanimous Court, with a concurrence from Justices Kavanaugh and Alito. The preemption defense that let brokers throw out negligent-selection cases before a jury ever saw the file, the one the Seventh Circuit had blessed in 2023, is gone in all fifty states. Shawn Montgomery, who lost his leg on the shoulder of Interstate 70 in Illinois in 2017 when a C.H. Robinson-arranged carrier hit him, gets his trial.

That ruling landed on a freight market that had already started to turn. For the last decade, the cheapest truck on the load board was the one that got the freight. For the first time in that decade, the cheapest truck can’t find work, and the safe carrier is the one with pricing power. Contract truckload rates are up double digits year over year while volume is flat, which is the signature of a capacity base that has shrunk, not a demand boom per se. The carriers who survived the 2023 and 2024 washout on low-cost structure are the ones the market is now pricing out, and the operators who invested in maintenance, drivers, and real insurance are, for once, getting paid for it. Safety became a commodity you can sell. That’s new.

How the toxic pool got built

The structural cause of cheap freight was never a mystery, and it starts with the consumer. A decade of ultra-cheap imported goods trained millions of Americans to expect products to cost almost nothing and to ship for free. Large retailers with enormous logistics leverage pushed the consumer-facing cost of shipping toward zero, which suppressed the one market signal that tells a supply chain that moving freight a thousand miles costs real money. Suppress that signal at the register, and you suppress it everywhere behind the register. Shippers negotiate to it, brokers source to it, and carriers bid to it, all the way down until the rate only pencils for an operator who has compressed every cost he has, including the ones that keep people alive.

The numbers underneath that compression are documented. Carriers were taking spot rates in nominal terms roughly equal to the 2014 peak while the American Transportation Research Institute put operating costs up about 34 percent over the same stretch. Demand did its own damage from the other side. GLP-1 appetite drugs, Ozempic and Wegovy and Mounjaro and the class around them, now reach a meaningful share of American households, and the users cut caloric intake and grocery spending enough that analysts have tied it to hundreds of thousands of lost refrigerated truckloads a year, with Del Monte Foods citing a packaged-food demand decline on its way into 2025 bankruptcy. Food freight is the backbone of reefer volume, and it is compressing in a way that looks structural rather than cyclical. Tens of thousands of carriers left the industry in 2023 and 2024, and the ones who stayed were disproportionately the cheapest, which is a polite way of saying the ones who cut the most.

At the very bottom, below low-value freight, sits no-value freight. Garbage, municipal solid waste, scrap, material with zero commercial worth. Under 49 CFR Part 371, broker authority requirements attach to arranging transportation of property with commercial value, and certain solid-waste categories have historically fallen outside that framework entirely. You dont need broker authority, a surety bond, or FMCSA registration to arrange the movement of trash. The accountability chain that broker regulation builds in the legitimate market simply is not there, and the carriers working that space run at highway speed and full weight next to everyone else. The spot market at the bottom does not select for the worst carriers by accident. It manufactures them.

The three-box carrier that the ruling just repriced

For most of the spot market, verifying a carrier for a load meant four clicks. Confirm the DOT number exists in SAFER. Confirm the MC number is active. Confirm a certificate of insurance is on file. Confirm the carrier is not rated Unsatisfactory or Conditional. That process checks whether a carrier is permitted to operate. It says nothing about whether the carrier is safe to operate, which is a different question with a different answer, and the gap between the two is where people die. Most of the fleet carries no safety rating at all because most carriers have never had a compliance review, so the fourth box is usually blank anyway. A rating and an authority can be bought for about $1,200. Three hundred dollars, a rented truck, and an instant-issue, self-attested, non-underwritten policy, and you are a motor carrier.

That three-box process was standard for one reason, and Montgomery is the reason it can’t stay standard. Under the old preemption rule, a broker that put a carrier with four open alerts and canceled insurance on a load had no legal downside if that carrier killed someone. Confirm the three boxes, move the freight, collect the spread. The carrier’s minimum coverage paid what it could, and the broker’s exposure evaporated. After May 14, a broker that booked a bad carrier while public federal data showed 300 crashes and eight fatalities and a top-tier risk score is going to answer a hard question about what due diligence means when the tools exist, are public, and were not used. The Court was careful that this is accountability, not automatic liability: a broker who acts in good faith with a reputable carrier can still defeat the claim. The good actors were handed a defense. The three-box shops were handed a bill.

What the data shows about the two biggest brokers

I built a broker picture from the inspection record. When an officer stops a loaded truck, the report captures the broker, the shipper, and the carrier in a single line, and it captures what the officer actually found, not what anyone claimed. Across C.H. Robinson and Total Quality Logistics, the two largest brokers in the country, that data covers 1,730 carriers.

C.H. Robinson says it works with 450,000 contract carriers and moves 37 million shipments a year. The 923 of those carriers with inspection records in FMCSA carry the marks of the pool the spot market builds. Thirty of them had a fatal crash in the past 24 months, for 46 people dead. Seven hundred of the 923, a little over three-quarters, have never held an FMCSA safety rating because they have never had a compliance review. One hundred thirty-two run vehicle out-of-service rates at or above 50 percent, and 74 run driver out-of-service rates that high. TQL’s 807 carriers read the same way and worse on the fraud markers: seven fatal crash events and 18 dead, 91 percent never rated, and 44 carriers carrying an authority-transfer flag, THE TEA’s marker for a pattern consistent with an old operation reappearing under a new identity. Forty-four is more than seven times the six flags in C.H. Robinson’s pool, a concentration of chameleon-carrier risk inside a single broker’s documented freight.

The individual names are where the abstract stops. Twin Carrier LLC out of Georgia, DOT 3518735, ran 62 crashes in 24 months, two of them fatal, on three simultaneous SMS alerts, unrated, with $1,000 in coverage that had been canceled. Twin Carrier is one of the oldest carriers in the Super Ego network and carries two wrongful-death cases in Pennsylvania and Ohio. Clement Transport out of New Jersey, DOT 3371628, posted a 100 percent hazmat out-of-service rate, meaning every driver it put through a hazmat inspection came out of it parked. Contract Freighters out of Missouri, DOT 70289, ran 104 crashes in 24 months, four of them fatal, and held a satisfactory safety rating the whole time. Every one of these was in a major broker’s documented carrier history.

Cobra wasn’t the exception. Cobra was the book.

One name in that broker data is the thread that ties this whole thing to the insurance side. Cobra Inc out of Pennsylvania, DOT 3525693, ran 30 crashes, one fatal, unrated, and the insurer on file is Universal Casualty Risk Retention Group. When I first flagged that, it read as one bad carrier matched to one questionable insurer. It isn’t. The insurer exposure model, built on the federal financial-responsibility filings that every carrier files as a BMC-91, now scores 248 insurers by the safety records of the carriers they cover. Universal Casualty covers 641 carriers, and 81 percent of that book scores high-risk. Its average carrier risk is 86.2 out of 100. Cobra was not the outlier in Universal Casualty’s book. Cobra was a fair sample of it.

A risk retention group is an insurer owned by its own policyholders, chartered under the federal Liability Risk Retention Act, 15 U.S.C. 3901. That law lets the group write across state lines under one state’s charter, and it carves the group out of the state guaranty funds that stand behind ordinary insurers. When a normal insurer fails, a state fund pays the open claims up to a limit. When a risk retention group fails, there is no fund. The claims in flight become a line in a bankruptcy, and the injured party collects what’s left. A carrier can hold active authority, a filed policy, and a certificate that satisfies the federal minimum under 49 CFR Part 387, and still be one insurer failure away from a promise nobody is obligated to keep. Universal Casualty’s own instability score, built from its portfolio rather than its carriers’ crashes, is the highest of any risk retention group we track, and the book is still growing.

The next part runs the full list of 248, and the specialty insurance market is in retreat, shedding trucking policies faster than it writes them, which is what a hard market looks like from inside an underwriting shop. The risk retention groups carrying the worst instability scores are doing the opposite. Universal Casualty is growing. National Transportation Insurance Company Risk Retention Group is growing. The carriers the backstopped market is dropping are landing in the corner of the market that has no backstop. That is a migration, and it means the certificate of insurance stapled to a rate confirmation is doing less real work every quarter it goes unread. After Montgomery, the broker who didn’t read it owns part of what happens next.

The shippers on the cheap end of the same trade

The insurance model looks at who insures the bad carriers. A second model looks at who ships with them. Working from the same inspection records, we score a shipper by the safety records of the carriers its freight actually rode with, counted only where a shipper spreads freight across at least ten carriers, so the number reflects a selection pattern and not one odd lane. The caveat is that the shipper field on a bill of lading is dirty, filled with brokers and yard codes as often as real shippers, so this reads as direction, not as a precise ranking, and the measure that carries it is how far a shipper’s carriers run above the national average risk score rather than the raw number, which cancels the inspection bias that inflates every carrier the same way.

Two clusters sit at the top, and neither is a surprise once you’ve followed the cheap-freight chain down. Deep-discount retail is one. True Value, Dollar Tree, Family Dollar, and the dollar-store tier route freight through carriers running roughly 65 to 67 points above the national average, moving hundreds of shipments across dozens of carriers apiece. The oilfield sand business is the other, with Hi Crush, Superior Silica Sand, Freedom Proppant, and Black Mountain Sand all running 61 to 64 points high on a transient, high-turnover carrier base. This is the cheap-goods economy showing up as a safety number. Freight that has to move at the lowest possible rate moves on the carriers that only exist because the rate is that low, and now the record of who chose them sits on a public federal database that takes about ninety seconds to pull.

The bond that runs out at claimant 23

Ask the man in Tennessee what the accountability system produced for him. He runs one truck and has run it for twelve years. He took a load off DAT from a broker he hadn’t used, on a rate confirmation that looked clean, delivered on time, got a signed proof of delivery, and invoiced. Thirty days, nothing. Forty-five, nothing. The calls went to voicemail, and the emails bounced, and when he pulled SAFER, he found the broker’s authority had been revoked two weeks after he delivered. He filed against the $75,000 surety bond, which is exactly what the bond exists for. He was claimant 47. The bond was already gone. He got a check for $312.

The bond is inadequate by the numbers and by its history. The $75,000 figure was set in 2013 by MAP-21, after the requirement sat at $10,000 for forty years, and raising it to $75,000 still closed more than 7,500 brokerages that couldn’t get bonded at the higher amount. A broker running 50 loads a month can carry well over $100,000 in outstanding carrier payables at any moment, so when one collapses, the $75,000 splits across everyone in the queue. FMCSA data shows more than 400 brokers hit bond drawdowns a year, nearly one in five with total claims that blow past the bond, and the average recovery lands somewhere around $1,900 because carriers have learned that filing against an exhausted bond produces a $312 check. The fraud layer sits on top of that. Double-brokering and identity operations buy aged MC numbers with clean histories, spoof the phones, run a few weeks of loads without paying anyone, then dissolve and reappear. The bond, if there was one, was written against an entity that barely existed. The trail ends with whoever made the call.

The Super Ego network is the visible version of the same condition. The 60 Minutes investigation I did into that Serbia-connected operation, and which FMCSA Administrator Derek Barrs called one of the most notorious chameleon schemes on the road, documented drivers told to physically alter the DOT numbers on their doors and rate confirmations changed to cut driver pay by hundreds of dollars a load. Underneath all of it, the freight kept moving, because somewhere a broker confirmed three things on a SAFER screen and booked it.

What to do now that the tide has turned

If you run one truck or a small fleet on spot freight, the regulatory system still won’t protect you, so protect yourself. Verify broker authority on SAFER before you pick up, not after. Treat the $75,000 bond as a last resort that may already be pledged to 46 carriers ahead of you. Look hard at trade credit insurance: Allianz Trade, Coface, and Atradius write receivables coverage that pays 80 to 90 percent of an invoice on a broker default for roughly a fifth of a percent to one percent of insured receivables, and some non-recourse factoring programs bundle the same protection. Build shipper-direct relationships wherever the work allows, because the difference between contract freight with a shipper you know and spot freight from a stranger on a board is the difference between a business relationship and extending credit to someone you’ll never find again.

If you’re a broker or a shipper, the ruling changed your job description. Carrier selection used to be a procurement decision. It’s a documented legal exposure now, and the record of how you made it is public. That means checking real safety data, not a certificate, and keeping the paper that shows you did. The carrier vetting tools are not exotic and not expensive. The FMCSA SMS system, SAFER, crash history, out-of-service rates, authority-transfer indicators, and insurance quality that goes past confirming a certificate exists are all available today. The question the Court answered is whether there’s a consequence to choosing not to use them when the carrier you hired kills someone, and the answer is yes.

The market got to the same answer before the Court did. Safe carriers are a commodity that finally commands a price, and the cheapest operators on the board are running out of loads. The cheapest carrier was never the cheapest. It only looked that way on the rate confirmation, right up until the crash, or the unpaid invoice, or the insurer with no fund behind it, made you pay the rest of the bill. The wife cost more every month. She was the cheaper deal all along, and now the law and the market agree on it.

I’m pro-US trucking. I drove it, brokered it, owned it, oversaw it, fixed it, ran fleets in it, and sit in meetings where decisions about it get made. My father’s side of this is farming, my mom’s side was Gissel Packing, and my own side of it is a CDL. I’m not distant from this industry.

I didn’t say I’m pro whoever is willing to pay me. I didn’t say I’m pro any publication or media outlet, including the ones I write for. I didn’t say I’m pro all industry vendors, or pro every association, or pro the narrative. Those are five separate positions, and I hold none of them; the reason I’m writing this is the industry has spent a long time treating them as though they’re the same position. My outdoor cat persona allows me to be me, not for everyone else at the expense of me. I’ll go back to driving full time or working fields before I’d allow someone to compromise my principles, but that's not everybody in this industry. The industry is bought and paid for in so many ways.

We don’t take everyone’s money, and we don’t take everyone as a client. That sounds like a marketing line, and it isn’t; it’s a cost. Turning down revenue is the only proof of independence that can’t be faked, because everything else is something you say about yourself. Anybody can publish a values page. Not everybody can point at the invoice they didn’t send. That’s why they call me an “outdoor cat.” I eat what I hunt and kill and work for; I don’t eat what someone gives me. I’m not fed or housetrained or domesticated. I say no when I want to because I feed myself. If you stand for nothing, you'll fall for everything.

Capture doesn’t require anybody to be corrupt

The version of this story where somebody hands over an envelope is mostly wrong. Almost nobody in this industry is taking a bribe. What’s actually happening is slower and more respectable, and it works on people who think of themselves as honest, which is exactly why it works. Capture that required villains would be easy to find and easy to fix.

A vendor sponsors a program, and now there’s a relationship. A publication sells a booth, and now the person you’d have to report on is the person funding the conference that keeps the lights on. An executive joins an advisory board, and now he has access he’d rather not lose. A media property takes an equity stake, or its parent does, and now the story runs into a conflict nobody can speak on out loud. An association’s largest members fund the association, and the association advocates for positions its largest members hold, which is not a scandal; it’s the job description.

At no point in that sequence does anyone instruct anyone else what not to write. That’s the part people miss when they go looking for a smoking gun. The instruction is unnecessary because the incentive already did the work, and a reporter who has to decide between a story and a relationship usually chooses the relationship without ever consciously deciding. I’ve watched this happen to people I like and respect. I’ve felt the pull myself, which is why I recognize it, which is also why when I walk away from people, cliques, groups, or organizations, associations or publications or even clients, there’s a reason.

Silence is the product

You can buy coverage in this industry, and everybody knows it, and honestly, the paid coverage is the least of the problem because it’s labeled. Sometimes the sponsors sponsor you because they need your writers and reporters to not talk poorly about them, and when you’ve sanctioned that in the past, they know what they bought, and they know what to expect in the future. The bigger purchase is the absence of coverage, and that one is cheaper, quieter, and leaves nothing behind. There’s no correction to issue on a story that never ran. There’s no disclosure requirement on an investigation somebody killed in a meeting nobody minuted.

Count the critical coverage in trucking media over the last five years and then sort it by who the subject was. Small carriers get covered aggressively, and they should, because that’s where a great deal of the fraud lives, and I’ve written more of that coverage than most people. Now count the adversarial coverage of vendors, associations, technology providers, and service companies with marketing budgets. Count negative coverage of those who don’t sponsor the media outlet vs coverage against sponsored vendors by the same outlet. The rate of critical coverage in this industry runs roughly inverse to the advertising spend, and that isn’t a conspiracy; it’s a business model operating exactly as designed.

There are products sold into American trucking with documented failure histories, including failures that show up in crash records and in litigation, and the coverage of those products tracks the marketing budget rather than the failure record. Some of those vendors sponsor policy work, industry voices, and safety programs. A vendor funding the safety conversation while its own product sits in the discovery file of a wrongful death case is a conflict, whether or not anybody involved intends it as one. The conflict doesn’t require the vendor to do anything improper. It only requires everyone downstream of the check to notice where the check came from, which people do automatically and without being asked. I’ve had articles completely scraped for discussing vendors in “the clique,” and I’ve had directives to add these bad vendors when I’ve refused to mention them. Someone more focused on the check might accommodate me? I removed the entire article. I refuse to mention and advocate people’s purchase of trash vendors. There is no check you will ever write me to make me do that.

The vendors who make the fraud possible

The fraud networks I’ve been mapping for the last year don’t run on trucks. They run on services. Somebody has to factor the invoices, and some factors have shown remarkably little curiosity about who’s on the other end of a receivable. Somebody has to file the authority paperwork and serve as process agent, and there are BOC-3 shops with thousands of carriers registered to a single mailbox. Somebody has to write the insurance, and I’ve documented what happens when that somebody is a risk retention group with a photocopier and a story. Somebody has to vet the carrier, and there are vetting services that sell a green checkmark rather than an answer.

Every one of those vendors has legitimate customers, and most of their business is legitimate. That’s what makes the problem hard, and it’s why I keep saying the industry can’t solve it by pointing at the trucks. A chameleon network needs a factor, an agent, an insurer, a broker willing not to look, and a compliance product willing to say the carrier is fine. Remove any one of those and the model gets harder to run. Nobody wants to be the one who says that at a conference where those companies bought tables.

The fair version of the other side

Trade journalism is funded by the industry it covers. That’s true of every trade press in every sector, and it’s not optional, because there’s no consumer subscription base large enough to fund reporting on freight brokerage. Associations exist to advocate for their members, which means taking positions their members pay them to take is not corruption; it’s the literal function of a membership organization. Vendors sponsor safety programming because safety programming costs money and somebody has to pay for it. Sponsorship is not a scandal, and I’ve been on sponsored panels.

The line isn’t whether money changed hands. The line is whether the money bought the position, and whether anybody told you it did. Disclosure is the whole ballgame. Every article I publish carries a block at the bottom naming what I sell and to whom, because my consulting practice creates an interest in the arguments I make and the reader is entitled to weigh that. It costs me nothing to write that block, and it costs the reader nothing to read it. The number of industry voices who do the same thing is small enough to be worth noticing.

Pro industry means hostile to the people wrecking it

Being pro trucking and being protective of everyone in trucking are opposite positions, and the industry keeps conflating them.

The carrier who does it right pays for the carrier who doesn’t. He pays in the premium pool, because the losses generated by the worst books get spread across everybody buying commercial auto. He pays in the rate, because a fraudulent operator with no compliance cost underbids him on freight he should have won. He pays in the regulatory response, because enforcement written in the aftermath of a mass-casualty event is indiscriminate by design and lands hardest on the people who were already compliant. He pays in the reputation, in the jury pool, in the recruiting pipeline and at the dinner table when somebody asks what he does for a living.

Protecting bad actors is not industry advocacy. It’s a transfer of cost from the operators who created the problem to the operators who didn’t. Every quiet position, every unpublished story, and every paid-for policy stance is part of that transfer, and the people receiving the transfer are a small fraction of the people paying for it. An industry that shields its worst operators isn’t defending itself; it’s taxing its best ones to subsidize its worst.

I wrote a piece this week arguing that trucking finances risk from the wrong end: a control purchased early costs dollars, and the same risk purchased late costs a verdict. This is that same argument applied to speech. Saying the uncomfortable thing early is cheap. It costs a sponsorship, a relationship, an invitation, a client. Saying nothing costs nothing until four people die in Jay County, Indiana, and then the bill arrives for everybody at once, written by people who don’t know this industry and aren’t in a mood to be careful with it.

I’d rather pay on the front end. That’s the whole position, and it’s why the list at the top of this article is written as a list of things I’m not. The measure of anybody in this business isn’t what they claim to support. It’s what they turned down. Pay attention to who sponsors what, who sponsors who, and what messages those sponsorships push, and watch the correlation and the silence that checks purchase.

So before we kick off the final installment of this series, I wanted to also give a shoutout to Attorney Brandon Wiseman for building a great carrier vetting program and training, which can be found here. While it is technically a Trucksafe product, I have nothing to do with it, and it was all Brandon. Check out his program at that link; it's interactive and at your own pace.

Carrier Vetting After Montgomery

Part V. How to Vet

19. The protocol

Everything in Parts I through IV converges on a sequence. The sequence is the same whether the seat belongs to a broker, a shipper, or an underwriter, because the carrier and the risk are the same. Only the depth changes with the seat and the freight. What follows is the order, why the order is the order, and how each step fails when it’s skipped or run out of sequence.

Identity comes first, before anything else is trusted. Every downstream check verifies facts about an entity, and if the entity in front of you isn’t the entity those facts describe, you’ve verified somebody else. Confirm the legal name, DOT and MC together, the FMCSA-registered contact channel rather than the channel that answered you, and continuity: same operator this year as last year, same iron, no migration pattern. A fluid identity doesn’t get scored. It stops the process, because you can’t underwrite what you can’t identify, and every chameleon and double-brokering loss in the record started with an identity somebody took on faith.

Then the eligibility floor, live, not cached. Active authority for the transportation being arranged, no out-of-service order, required financial responsibility in force and applicable. These are pulled at the time of the decision from the live federal record, because authority status and OOS orders change daily and a cached snapshot fails in both directions: it rejects the carrier whose order was lifted Tuesday and passes the one revoked Thursday. The floor items aren’t judgment calls and nobody in the revenue chain gets to waive one because the load is hot. A salesperson can’t clear a hard stop. That sentence belongs in your written policy in roughly those words.

Then measure the exposure, which is where the compliance check ends and the risk check starts. Read the safety record as outcomes: crash rate against exposure rather than raw count, out-of-service results against the national baseline, severity over paperwork, trend over snapshot, recency weighted over ancient history. Then read the signals that live outside the FMCSA record entirely, because they’re what a plaintiff pulls and a compliance tool doesn’t: federal litigation history and how recent and how severe, corporate structure and the network behind the authority, insurer identity and policy structure rather than filing presence, and the coherence of the declared operation, trucks against drivers against inspections against the volume the carrier is accepting. A carrier that fails coherence isn’t a scoring question. It’s a section 15 question.

Then scale it to the load, which section 20 covers, because the same carrier is a different total risk under different freight.

Then read confidence and trajectory before you read the score. How much record actually stands behind the number, and which direction the carrier is moving. A thin record is elevated risk, not clean risk. A carrier trending down out of a bad stretch is a different decision than the same score trending up, and the trend is the fact a snapshot throws away.

Then document the decision, at the time of the decision. Section 22 is that step in full. The short version: the file gets written when you say yes, in risk terms, with the data as it stood that day, or the file effectively doesn’t exist.

Then monitor and re-vet on triggers, because selection decays. Authority revocations, insurance cancellations, out-of-service orders, crashes, and score deterioration all arrive after onboarding, and a vetting program that runs once has a shelf life measured in weeks. The triggers that matter are the fast ones: revocation, lapse, OOS order, reportable crash. The cadence items are the slow ones: rating changes, trend deterioration, network changes behind the entity. A carrier unused for ninety days gets re-verified at tender as if it were new, because for your purposes it is.

The protocol reads long and runs short. Steps one and two are seconds with the right tooling. Step three is the depth dial, thirty seconds for routine freight and thirty minutes for the freight that deserves it. The sequence is the part that can’t flex, because each step assumes the ones before it, and the industry’s standard failure is running step three carefully on an identity nobody confirmed in step one.

20. Scaling scrutiny to the load

A vetting standard that treats every load the same is wrong twice. It over-inspects the routine freight, which trains your people to route around the process, and it under-inspects the freight that can end the company, which is the failure you actually can’t afford. Risk is a property of the carrier and the load together, and the standard has to price both.

Severity scales with the freight in ways that are knowable at tender. Hazmat carries release exposure and a federal incident history you can check, and it converts a crash into an evacuation. High-value and theft-targeted commodities, electronics, pharmaceuticals, alcohol, copper, pull organized theft the way a porch light pulls moths, and the theft rings work the same load boards you do. Dense urban lanes put the truck next to more people per mile. Venue matters and pretending it doesn’t is malpractice with extra steps: the same crash produces materially different verdicts in different jurisdictions, the plaintiff bar publishes its own venue rankings, and a lane running through a high-verdict county is carrying that fact whether your process prices it or not. Team and expedited service adds fatigue exposure by design, because the service commitment is the hours pressure. Each of those facts is visible before the freight moves, and each one should tighten the screen: higher score floor, senior approval, verified rather than filed insurance at limits matched to the exposure instead of the 1980s minimum, tracking, pickup verification, and a documented file.

The insurance piece deserves its own sentence because it’s where load scaling gets concrete. A million-dollar limit behind a dry van of paper towels on a rural lane and the same limit behind a tanker through a metro corridor aren’t the same coverage. The required limit for the load is a function of what the load can do, and a carrier whose coverage doesn’t answer the freight’s real exposure is effectively uninsured for your purposes even though its filing is perfectly compliant. That’s an eligibility question, not a scoring question, once the gap gets big enough.

The other half of scaling is the improvement direction, and it’s the half that keeps the standard from strangling your capacity. A standard that only declines produces a carrier pool of incumbents and starves everything else, which is commercially impossible and also bad risk policy, since the marginal carrier that’s genuinely improving is tomorrow’s core carrier. The answer is graduated use: the not-yet-proven carrier gets defined freight, defined lanes, trial volume, controls at pickup, and monitoring, and earns its way up as the record fills in. That graduated file, this carrier was new, we treated it as new, here were the controls, is itself a defensible document. Blanket exclusion isn’t the defensible position. Proportionate response is.

21. Reading the data the way a courtroom reads it

The same public record gets read three ways: by a dispatcher deciding in ninety seconds, by an underwriter pricing a book, and by a plaintiff’s expert building a case. The third read is the one your file eventually gets, so you should know what it looks like, and the honest way to know is to describe the workup, because it’s the same workup I’m retained to perform.

The expert starts with the crash and works backward to the selection. The carrier’s profile gets pulled as of the tender date, not today’s date, because the question is what you could have known when you said yes. The Freedom of Information Act reaches the historical MCMIS snapshots, so the profile as it stood that Tuesday is recoverable whether you saved it or not. Then the record gets read for everything Parts II and IV cover: the rating and its date, the OOS rates against baseline, the violation mix and what it says about maintenance and hours culture, the crash history with severity, authority age, the corporate formation date against the authority date, officer and address overlaps, the insurance history with its lapses, and the litigation record. Every red flag that existed on tender day goes in a column, and the column becomes a demonstrative titled something like what the defendant could have seen for free.

Then your process gets read against the column. The requests for production ask for your carrier selection policy, your vetting file for this carrier, your monitoring alerts, your exception approvals, and your communications about this load. The depositions ask who checked what, when, and what they did with it. The two failure modes are mirror images. If you had no process, the argument is that a reasonable company looks and you didn’t. If you had a process and didn’t follow it, the argument is worse, because your own policy becomes the standard of care and your own document proves you breached it. A written standard you honor is a shield. A written standard you ignore is the plaintiff’s best exhibit, and they’d rather have it than nothing.

The defense read is the same data run the other direction, and it’s worth understanding because it’s what a good file makes possible. The defense expert shows what the profile looked like on tender day: the rating that was satisfactory or unrated, the OOS rates that sat at or under baseline, the crash history that was unremarkable at the carrier’s size, the flags that existed and the controls that answered them, the documented reasoning. Hindsight is the plaintiff’s whole advantage, and a contemporaneous file is the only thing that takes it away, because it moves the argument from what the data shows now to what a reasonable company did then. That’s the entire game, and it’s decided before the crash by whether the file exists.

Part VI. Defensibility

22. The file is the case

After a catastrophe, the selection file is the case. Not a piece of it. The case. Liability on the carrier is usually clear, and damages are usually enormous, so the contested question, the one the years of litigation are actually about, is whether the party that chose the carrier was reasonable to choose it. That question gets answered by a file, and the file either exists from the day of the decision or it gets reconstructed two years later by lawyers, from fragments, under oath, badly.

Contemporaneous is the whole word. The federal data changes continuously, so the carrier’s profile at deposition time can look nothing like it did at tender, and without a dated record the jury sees today’s ugly profile with the plaintiff’s implication that you saw it too. A dated snapshot of what the record actually showed on the day you said yes is the single most valuable document in the defense, and it’s also the cheapest, because capturing it costs a timestamp and storage. The gap between those two facts, decisive value and trivial cost, is the strongest argument in this entire guide, and it’s the one I’d put on a poster in every brokerage in the country.

What the file contains, for any carrier that isn’t routine, and in risk terms throughout. The identity as verified: legal name, DOT and MC, the contact channel used and how it was confirmed. The eligibility items as pulled live, with the timestamp. The data as it stood: the rating and its date, the safety figures, the insurance verification with insurer and limits and structure, and any flag that existed. The load and its severity profile, because the reasonableness of the selection is judged against the freight. The controls applied: tracking, pickup verification, direct insurance confirmation, trial limits, whatever answered the flags. The reason for proceeding, stated as risk reasoning. The approver, their role, and the scope of the approval. If the carrier was on a graduated or improvement track, include the plan and the checkpoint status, because a carrier under documented monitoring is materially easier to defend than the same carrier chosen cold.

Build it into the workflow, or it won’t happen. A documentation step that requires a dispatcher to assemble screenshots after the fact will be skipped exactly as often as the dispatcher is busy, which is always, and inconsistent documentation is its own exhibit, since the loads with files make the loads without files look like decisions to hide something. The capture has to be automatic, attached to the tender event, and exportable on demand. The test of the system is blunt: pull any load at random from two years ago and produce, in minutes, a dated file showing what was checked, what it showed, and why the answer was yes. If your operation can’t pass that test today, that’s the gap to close before any other spending in this guide.

23. What the record says, and what it never says

Discovery produces two kinds of documents: the file you built on purpose and the communications you didn’t think of as documents. Emails, texts, TMS notes, and chat messages all get produced, and the sentences your people write under load pressure are the sentences a jury hears read aloud. This section is about those sentences.

The ones that end cases are ordinary. Needed the truck. Customer was screaming. Rep’s used this guy forever, he’s fine. Just get it covered. They’ve got authority and insurance, send it. Every one of those is a normal operational sentence, typed a thousand times a day across the industry, and every one of them converts, in a courtroom, into an admission that capacity outranked safety at the moment of decision. The improper-hiring theory that drives verdict size runs entirely on sentences like these, because they let the plaintiff argue the choice was knowing. The crash was an accident. The email is a decision, and juries punish decisions.

The fix isn’t coaching people to write carefully, which fails, and it definitely isn’t telling people to stop writing things down, which is spoliation bait and worse than the disease. The fix is giving the pressure somewhere legitimate to go. When a dispatcher needs an exception, the process routes it to someone with risk authority and no commission on the load, and that person’s documented reasoning is the record: the flag, the mitigation, the scope, the approval. The exception happened either way. The difference is whether the record is a reasoned risk decision by an authorized person or a text that says, “Just get it covered.” Same load, same carrier, opposite exhibits.

Approval authority is the structural version of the same point. The person who clears a flagged carrier can’t be a person paid on the load, because the plaintiff’s cross writes itself: you earned commission on this shipment, and you also decided the safety concern didn’t matter. Risk approval sits with someone whose compensation doesn’t move with the answer, and that org chart fact, cheap to implement, testifies well, and its absence testifies terribly, is one of the highest-leverage changes in this whole part.

24. Contracts, indemnity, and the empty pocket

Selection diligence governs whether you chose well. Contracts govern who pays when something goes wrong anyway, and the standard broker-carrier agreement in circulation was drafted for the world where preemption did the heavy lifting. Post-Montgomery, the paper needs to actually work, and whether it works comes down to three structural points and one hard truth.

The insurance provisions are the load-bearing wall. The agreement specifies minimum coverage by type and limit, requires the carrier’s policy to be primary and non-contributory so the carrier’s insurer answers before yours, and names you as additional insured where the structure supports it. Each phrase does a job. Primary and non-contributory is the difference between the carrier’s insurer defending the claim and a coverage fight where your own carrier pays first and chases later. Additional insured status gets you a defense under their policy rather than just a reimbursement promise. None of it means anything if the verification in the protocol didn’t happen, because the contract can require a million any-auto and the carrier can be carrying scheduled coverage from a sinking RRG, and you find out which one at the claim.

The re-brokering prohibition is the contractual half of section 15. The agreement bars re-brokering, interlining, or substituting another carrier without written consent, and states that the carrier accepting the load is the carrier physically hauling it. The clause doesn’t stop a fraudster; paper never does. What it does is establish the breach cleanly, support the claim against the carrier that handed off your freight, and, just as importantly, document that your program prohibited the thing, which matters when the question is whether you were reasonable.

Indemnification runs in your favor and covers the carrier’s negligence, with the carrier obligated to defend as well as indemnify. Then the hard truth, and it’s the sentence this section exists for: an indemnity clause is only as good as the balance sheet behind it. A promise to make you whole from a three-truck carrier with a minimum-limit policy from a weak market is a promise from an empty pocket, and when the pocket is empty, the plaintiff doesn’t go home. The plaintiff comes to you, which is exactly the scenario Montgomery reopened. That’s why the contract section of this guide is shorter than the vetting sections. The paper allocates the loss. Only the selection prevents it, and only real, verified, adequate coverage makes the allocation collectible. Get the terms reviewed by transportation counsel against the post-Montgomery landscape, and then remember that the best contract in the industry has never stopped a truck.

25. The deposition

The deposition is where the program you actually ran gets separated from the program you describe, and it follows a structure you can prepare for years in advance, because the structure is the same in nearly every case. What follows is the sequence as it runs, and what each phase is actually testing.

It opens with the witness’s role and the company’s process in the abstract, and the questions sound easy because they’re supposed to. Walk me through how a carrier gets approved. Who’s responsible for vetting? What does your policy require? The phase feels like background, and it’s actually the trap being set, because everything the witness claims here becomes the standard the specific load gets measured against. A witness who describes an aspirational process, the one in the manual rather than the one on the floor, has just built the gap the rest of the deposition will live in.

Then the policy documents come out, and the questions get specific. Your policy requires X. Was X done on this load? Show me where. The exhibits are your own documents: the selection policy, the vetting file or its absence, the TMS records, the emails from section 23. Every gap between the described process and the documented reality gets walked through one item at a time, slowly, on the record. This phase is why section 22 says the file is the case. A witness holding a dated, complete file answers these questions in minutes and the phase collapses. A witness without one spends three hours explaining absences, and every I don’t recall is a brick in the closing argument.

Then hindsight arrives dressed as fairness. The carrier’s profile from tender day goes on the screen, or worse, today’s profile if you can’t establish the tender-day version. You could see the conditional rating, correct. You could see the out-of-service rate, correct. This information was free, correct. You looked at none of it, correct. Four yeses in a row, each one individually harmless and honest, and the sequence is the case. The only answer that survives that sequence was written two years earlier: yes, we saw it, here’s the file, here’s what we did about it, here’s the reasoning, here’s who approved it. Defensibility isn’t eloquence in the chair. It’s the document that makes the chair boring.

The witness who does well is almost never the one who talks well. It’s the one whose answers are short, true, and backed by paper, who says I don’t know when they don’t know instead of improvising, and who never argues, because arguing hands over sentences. Preparation for that witness starts at tender, not at the subpoena. Every practice in this guide, the live checks, the file, the exception routing, the approval authority, exists so that the person in the chair can answer the hardest question in the case: why was this carrier a reasonable choice, by sliding a document across the table. Companies that can do that settle well or win. Companies that can’t fund the verdicts everyone else reads about.

Part VII. Where This Goes

26. The market sort

Montgomery doesn’t regulate anybody. What it does is reprice information, and repriced information sorts markets. The sort is already visible, and it runs through three channels.

Insurance moves first because insurance always moves first. Contingent auto and broker E&O were priced against a world where preemption killed most negligent selection claims before discovery, and that assumption died on May 14. Underwriters reprice by asking questions, so broker renewals now come with questionnaires about carrier selection standards, documentation, monitoring, and exception governance, and the answers move premium. A brokerage with a real program becomes a better risk than its peers for the first time in a way that shows up in dollars, which is the mechanism by which everything in Parts V and VI stops being a cost center. The market is about to pay you for your file.

Freight follows insurance. Shippers who understand section 10’s second-order exposure start auditing their brokers’ selection processes, because we relied on our broker only works as a defense if the broker was worth relying on, and proving that requires evidence gathered before the crash. Broker RFPs grow a diligence section. Brokers, in turn, steer volume toward carriers who can prove how they operate, because a carrier that can hand over its own operational evidence, real hours discipline, real maintenance closure, real driver management, makes the broker’s file stronger. The carriers who can show their work get the freight, and the demand for provable operations flows down the chain to the telematics and compliance infrastructure that produces the proof.

The bottom of the market contracts, and honesty requires saying what that means. The carriers that lose in the sort aren’t only the frauds. They include the marginal-but-real operators whose records can’t survive scrutiny and whose freight access tightens as the screens tighten. Some of that is exactly the point: capacity that shouldn’t exist exiting the market. Some of it’s the improvement problem from section 20, real carriers that need a route up rather than a wall, which is why graduated use and documented improvement matter as market policy and not just as legal defense. A sort with no ladder just pushes the bottom of the market further into the shadows, and the shadows are where the chameleons already live.

27. Rulemaking and the federal picture

The private-market sort runs ahead of the government, which is normal, but the federal track matters because it will eventually define terms everyone else has to use. Three threads are worth watching, and one honest caveat applies to all of them: rulemaking timelines slip, administrations change priorities, and anything in this section describes direction, not schedule.

The safety fitness determination problem is the oldest thread. The current three-tier rating system, satisfactory, conditional, unsatisfactory, reaches only the small fraction of carriers that receive compliance reviews, which is why most of the industry is unrated and why the rated field on a profile is so often a decade old. FMCSA has worked toward a revised safety fitness methodology for years, including the abandoned 2016 proposal and the renewed effort announced in the 2020s, and the core question has never changed: whether fitness can be determined from data rather than from site visits the agency lacks the staff to perform. Any rule that emerges will effectively federalize a version of the outcome-based reading this guide describes, and the companies already reading carriers that way will find the transition trivial while the checkbox operators rebuild.

The new entrant thread is the one closest to the problems in Part IV. The current new entrant program grants authority first and audits inside eighteen months, which is precisely backward for the chameleon problem, since the fraud is committed at registration and the audit arrives after the freight has moved. The anticipated direction is more scrutiny at the front gate: identity verification, fitness screening before authority rather than after, and harder matching of applicants against prior operators. Whatever final form that takes, the diligence burden it implies is one the private market is already carrying, because nobody selecting carriers today can wait for a rulemaking to solve the new entrant cohort for them.

The credit-for-safety thread is the sleeper. The FAST Act directed FMCSA to establish a Beyond Compliance program recognizing carriers that invest in safety technology and practices above the regulatory minimum, and the concept has mostly sat dormant at the federal level while the market built it anyway: insurers pricing telematics, brokers preferring carriers with provable operations, the whole show-your-work economy of section 26. If the federal version ever matures, it converges with the market version, and the direction of both is the same sentence this guide keeps arriving at. The floor is compliance. The question is what a carrier can prove beyond it.

28. What I’d do Monday if I ran a brokerage

Everything above compresses into a ninety-day sequence, ordered by leverage, with the parts that cost attention separated from the parts that cost money. Most of the leverage is in the attention half, which is the fact that should change how you read the whole list.

The first two weeks cost attention. Write the carrier selection standard, or rewrite the one nobody follows, and make it the standard you’ll actually run: floor items, score thresholds, load scaling, exception routing, approval authority held by someone with no commission on the load. Move approval authority now, because it’s an org chart edit with the testimonial value of a capital project. Kill the cached status checks and make authority, OOS, and insurance verification live at tender. Send the two sentences that cost nothing and change behavior immediately: sales can’t clear a hard stop, and exceptions go to risk in writing.

The first month closes the documentation gap, because section 22’s random-load test is the whole program in one question. Whatever your systems are, the tender event has to capture a dated snapshot: what was checked, what it showed, who approved it, and why. If your TMS can’t, bolt it on, and if you have to choose between spending here and spending anywhere else in this list, spend here. The file is the case, and the file is built at tender or never.

The first quarter builds the depth. Stand up monitoring with real triggers, revocation, lapse, OOS, crash, and a documented response path, because an alert you didn’t act on is worse in discovery than no alert. Run your active carrier list through the Part IV screens: identity, network, coherence, insurance structure, and expect findings, because every book has them. Build the graduated track for new and marginal carriers so declines become pathways and your capacity survives your standards. Pull your broker-carrier agreement and put it in front of transportation counsel against the post-Montgomery landscape. Then audit yourself before anyone else does: pull twenty random loads, run the test, and fix what fails.

None of this is beyond a ten-person brokerage, and none of it’s optional for a thousand-person one. The economics changed on May 14 in one specific way: the work this guide describes used to be a cost you could skip because preemption made the skipping free, and now the skipping is the most expensive decision in the building. The data was always public. The carriers were always knowable. The only thing Montgomery changed is that somebody finally gets to ask, in front of a jury, whether you looked. Make the answer yes, and make it a document.

Every truck and broker risk gets financed twice…Once on the front end at a price you set, or once on the back end at a price a jury sets. Trucking has spent 40 years choosing the second one, and the reason isn’t ignorance. It’s that the people who skip the cheap end almost never pay the expensive one.

I have never once enjoyed paying to park a truck.

Twenty dollars for a gated lot with lights, a camera, and a fence, when there’s a free truck stop 11 miles up the road with an open row along the back. At 2100, with a receipt in your hand, you have to explain to somebody that the math looks obvious. It isn’t obvious. It’s backward. That twenty dollars isn’t the cost of parking; it’s the price of retiring four or five separate losses I’d otherwise carry on my own balance sheet overnight with a $5 million load sitting on the back.

Cut the seal on that trailer, and I don’t have a claim; I have a rejection, and a rejection is the load plus the claim plus the customer. Fill the lot and send my driver back out to hunt for a space, and I’m buying an hours-of-service violation, a percentile, a premium, and eventually a broker who screens me out of his network without ever telling me why. Send him to the shoulder instead, and I’m buying the fact pattern the Supreme Court just spent a term on. Shawn Montgomery was stopped on the shoulder of Interstate 70 in Illinois when Caribe Transport II’s truck hit him and took his leg.

Twenty dollars against all of that isn’t an expense. It’s a purchase, and what it purchases is control over the price. The same purchase shows up at every other decision point in a trucking operation, at a maintenance interval, at a hiring standard, at a camera policy, at an insurance limit, at a carrier vetting pull. Each one is a risk you can finance now at a number you choose, or later at a number somebody else chooses for you. The distance between those two numbers runs from a parking receipt to a nine-figure verdict, and the only thing that changes along the way is who holds the pen when the price gets written.

The layers, and who pays for each one

Risk in trucking is financed in stacked layers, and the layer you’re standing on determines who writes the check and how fast it clears. Most people in this business can name two of them. There are six. Naming all six is the only way to see which ones you control and which ones control you, and the answer is not evenly split.

Layer zero is the operating decision. Parking, maintenance interval, hiring standard, dispatch pressure, governor setting, camera policy, the decision to pull a Pre-Employment Screening Program report or skip it. It’s priced in dollars per truck per week. It’s fully controllable, it’s fully deductible, and it never appears anywhere on a balance sheet under the heading of risk. That last part matters more than it sounds like it should, because a cost with no risk label attached is a cost that gets cut in a bad quarter by somebody who has no idea what he just sold.

Layer one is the retention. The deductible, or self-insured retention, means the first dollars of any loss are the carrier’s own money. It runs from $2,500 at the small end to $5 million or more for a large fleet operating with self-insurance authority under 49 CFR 387.309, or through a fronted program where a rated paper company issues the policy and the captive takes the working layer back through reinsurance. Front-end discipline shows up here faster than anywhere else in the stack, because a fleet with a real program is buying its own losses at cost instead of buying them at a marked-up premium. A fleet without one is doing the same thing and finding out what its losses actually cost for the first time.

Layer two is primary. The federal floor is $750,000 under 49 CFR 387.9, a number Congress set in the Motor Carrier Act of 1980 and finalized in 1985, and it hasn’t moved since. The practical floor on the road is $1 million combined single limit, and that number comes from shipper and broker contracts rather than from any regulation. The market, not the federal government, has set the real minimum in this industry for four decades. Every argument about raising the federal number is an argument about the floor under the contracts, not about what most fleets are actually carrying.

Layer three is excess and umbrella. Stacked towers, a lead $1 million or $5 million, then $5 million to $25 million, then higher, each layer priced per million with the rate falling as you climb. This is where the commercial auto market repriced hardest after 2019 and where capacity actually left the room. A fleet that bought $50 million eight years ago is often assembling that same tower today out of four carriers instead of two, at a multiple of the old rate. The tower looks the same on a certificate and costs something else entirely to build.

Layer four is reinsurance and the catastrophe layer. Zurich, Old Republic, National Indemnity, Lloyd’s syndicates, and the fronting arrangements sitting behind the names on the certificate. I mapped this market in February, and the finding held. Northland is Travelers, Great West is Old Republic, and National Indemnity, GEICO’s commercial book, Guard and biBERK are all Berkshire Hathaway. State National and National Specialty are Markel, and ACE is Chubb. Five parent balance sheets, dozens of filing entities, and a broker pulling five certificates from five different names may be looking at one company’s appetite five times over.

Layer five is uninsured. The verdict minus the tower. It’s paid by the carrier’s balance sheet until the balance sheet is gone, and then it isn’t paid at all, which means it’s paid by everybody. Medicaid absorbs about 15.8 percent of the hospital cost, Medicare about 7.3 percent, and the rest lands on the hospital’s uncompensated care pool, the victim’s family, and the taxpayer. The people who created the exposure are the only participants who exit that transaction whole.

Layer zero is the only layer priced in advance. It’s the only layer the operator controls outright, the only layer where the buyer sets the terms, and the only layer this industry treats as optional. Every layer above it is priced by somebody else, on a schedule somebody else sets, in a currency that gets more expensive the higher you climb. That ordering is backward from how a business manages any other risk it owns, and it holds across fleets of every size.

Why the cheap end loses

An industry full of people who are competent at arithmetic systematically underfunds the layer that costs the least and returns the most. They do it consistently enough that individual bad judgment doesn’t explain it. Six structural reasons do, and every one of them is documentable, which makes this a design problem rather than a discipline problem. Operators respond to the incentives in front of them, the same as anybody else, and the incentives in front of them point at the back end.

The first is timing. Front-end cost is certain, immediate, and lands on this week’s operating margin. Back-end cost is probabilistic, delayed by years and lands on a different line item, sometimes on a different owner entirely. A controller looking at a quarter can see the parking reimbursement. He cannot see the crash that didn’t happen, because it didn’t.

The second is the pricing lag. Commercial auto liability is underwritten on three to five years of loss history, which means you spend on the front end in 2026 and the premium credit shows up in 2029, assuming your program still exists, your agent didn’t move the account, and the market hasn’t hardened underneath you in a way that swallows the credit whole. The reward for front-end discipline arrives after most people have stopped waiting for it. That’s not a moral failing on the part of operators; it’s a signal delay. It’s long enough that the signal frequently never gets received at all, and a control that never pays a visible dividend gets cut the first time somebody looks for money.

The third is that loss prevention has no revenue line. You can invoice a load. You cannot invoice a hijacking that didn’t occur, a rollover that didn’t happen, or an out-of-service order you avoided because somebody adjusted the brakes on Tuesday. What you purchased was an absence, and absences don’t show up in accounting systems built to count events. Every fleet in America can tell you what it spent on claims last year, and almost none of them can tell you what they spent preventing them.

The fourth is the ownership horizon, and this is the one I’ve watched from inside the room. A private equity hold on a trucking platform runs four to seven years. The tail on a catastrophic auto liability claim runs longer than that, sometimes considerably longer, between the filing, the discovery fights, the trial date, and the appeal. Safety capital spent in year two of a hold depreciates past the exit, and the loss it would have prevented lands on the next owner’s tower and the next owner’s carrier. I’m not going to tell you fleet executives sit in a conference room and say that part out loud, because they don’t. I’ll tell you the incentive is structured that way whether anybody names it or not, and incentives don’t require permission to work.

The fifth is the externality, and it’s where this stops being a business problem and starts being a public one. The carrier that fails doesn’t pay the verdict. The limited liability company dissolves, the equipment gets repossessed by the lender holding the title, the factoring company enforces its blanket lien on the receivables, and the plaintiff holds a judgment against an entity with a mailbox. The cost transfers to the victim, to Medicaid and Medicare, to the hospital, and to the premium pool every carrier still standing pays into. Front-end spending is privately expensive and publicly cheap. Back-end failure is privately cheap and publicly expensive, and that inversion is the whole problem.

The sixth reason is the one I’ve been reporting on for a year. If the business model is to run the paper until it gets hot and then reincarnate under a new DOT number, the back end costs nothing at all. Front-end spending in that model is pure loss with no offsetting return, because the operator was never going to be present for the claim. That’s not an irrational actor; that’s a rational actor responding correctly to the incentives in front of him and producing an outcome that lands on somebody else. Every chameleon network I’ve mapped, from Protrust in the Chicago suburbs to the entities under investigation after the Jay County, Indiana, crash that killed four members of an Amish community, runs on that arithmetic.

The broker has nothing but a front end

Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II settled the preemption question in May and left the financial responsibility question wide open. A broker’s only federal financial responsibility requirement is a $75,000 surety bond under 49 U.S.C. 13906 and 49 CFR 387.307, raised from $10,000 by MAP-21 in 2012. That bond is a payment instrument. It ensures carriers and shippers get paid when a broker defaults on freight charges, and its own statutory language says so.

The bond doesn’t respond to a bodily injury judgment, it doesn’t respond to a negligent selection claim, and it doesn’t respond to anything a jury does. There’s no federal requirement for a broker to carry bodily injury liability coverage in any amount. Contingent auto exists; it’s the policy that answers a negligent hiring claim, and it has always been a voluntary purchase made by the brokers sophisticated enough to understand the exposure. The unsophisticated ones skipped it because nobody made them buy it, and preemption meant they probably would never need it.

Map that against the layers above and the picture is unusual. A broker has no layer one, no layer two and no layer three unless he chose to buy them. What a broker has is layer zero. Vetting isn’t a compliance chore sitting adjacent to a broker’s risk program; vetting is the entire risk program, and it’s the only instrument in the box.

The reason this matters is blunt: if the load ends up on an unvetted truck, you selected the risk whether you meant to or not, and after Montgomery, a state court gets to ask you about it. Pulling authority age, out-of-service rates against the national average, Behavior Analysis and Safety Improvement Category percentiles with the date stamped on them, an insurance verification that includes the limits and the excess layers, and an officer, address and VIN cross-check for reincarnation runs to a few dollars a load. The cost of not pulling it starts where the carrier’s tower ends and stops wherever the jury decides. A jury will not be told the vetting was expensive, because it wasn’t.

The control everybody buys and nobody checks

Collecting a certificate of insurance is a front-end control, and it’s in near-universal use across freight brokerage. Verifying the solvency of the company named on that certificate is a different front-end control, and almost nobody performs it. A $1 million limit from a company that can’t pay it is a number printed on a page. That isn’t a theoretical concern, and I have the ledger to prove it.

Global Hawk Insurance Company Risk Retention Group was liquidated by a Vermont court on June 8, 2020. Its last annual statement claimed $42.7 million in assets against $609,481 the banks actually held, and its president, Jasbir Thandi, pleaded guilty last July to two counts of conspiracy to commit insurance fraud after moving roughly $14 million out of the company. The liquidator found 512 policies that never made it onto the company’s books at all, real filings in the federal system with no insurer behind them who knew they existed. Six years after that liquidation order, my dataset shows 2,748 carriers still carrying a Global Hawk filing of record in FMCSA’s system, including 131 carriers whose census records are active today. The insurer has been dead since 2020, and the paperwork doesn’t know it.

Layer the risk retention group problem on top. Under 15 U.S.C. 3902(a)(2), no risk retention group in America can participate in a state guaranty fund, and every RRG policy carries a notice saying so. When a traditional insurer fails, the state guaranty association pays the claims, and in Thandi’s own case the Texas guaranty association paid $4.8 million on the conventional insurer he also looted. The trucking side got nothing, by act of Congress. My extract covers 76 RRGs insuring 29,423 carriers with 209,854 crashes and 6,373 fatal crashes in the federal crash file, all of it sitting outside guaranty fund protection.

A broker who verified the limit and not the company behind it bought a document. He didn’t buy a control. The front end failed and gave no signal that it had failed, which is the only way front-end controls ever fail, and the failure doesn’t surface until the back end is the only thing left in the room. By then the question isn’t what the certificate said. It’s who’s still solvent enough to argue about it.

What it looks like when somebody does it right

The group captive is the one structure in this industry where front-end spending shows up as a number the member can actually read. Members fund a shared loss layer, and the underwriting profit on that layer comes back to the members who controlled their losses. Loss control isn’t a cost center in that structure; it’s the return. Nobody in a captive has to be persuaded that the front end matters, because it arrives on the distribution statement every year with a dollar figure attached.

The member who runs a real driver qualification program, replaces brake components on an interval instead of on a violation, and pays for parking gets his money back. The member who doesn’t funds the member who does. He gets a loss-control visit he didn’t ask for, then a rate action, and eventually he gets asked to leave the group. That sequence is the entire mechanism, and it works because the money moves fast enough for a human being to connect the spending to the return.

Compare that to the bottom of the food chain, where the entire product is speed. A quote in minutes, a policy in hours, a self-attested application, no inspection, no driver file review, and no verification that the three power units you declared aren’t the 30 you’re running. The front end hasn’t been neglected in that model; it’s been removed on purpose because removing it is the feature the customer is paying for. Speed is what’s being sold, and underwriting is the thing that had to go to sell it.

The regulations governing both models are identical. The federal minimum is identical. The direction of travel is opposite, and the variable that separates them is whether the party making the decision is the party who eats the loss. A captive member is buying his own losses and knows it. An instant-issue buyer is renting a filing.

What this costs, and who it costs

The front end is priced in dollars per truck per week, and it’s paid by the person making the decision. A maintenance interval, a Pre-Employment Screening Program report, a previous employer inquiry under 49 CFR 391.23, a camera, an insurance verification that goes one layer deeper than the certificate, a parking receipt. Each is a known quantity, purchased in advance, on terms the buyer sets. None of them requires anyone’s permission or a change in federal law.

The back end is priced by a jury and paid by whoever is left. The American Transportation Research Institute put the median nuclear verdict in trucking at $36 million in 2022 and the average verdict between 2020 and 2023 at $27.5 million, against a federal minimum that has been $750,000 since 1985 and covers well under 2 percent of that median. ATRI also found that in more than 80 percent of verdicts above $1 million, non-medical damages ran as much as 10 times the actual medical bills. That’s the number a carrier declines to buy down when it decides loss control is a line to squeeze.

The gap between those two prices isn’t a market failure in the ordinary sense, because markets clear when the party bearing the cost is the party making the choice. In this market, those are frequently different parties, and in the worst corners of it they’re deliberately different parties. Separating them is what a shell entity accomplishes on purpose. A dissolved LLC accomplishes it after the fact, and an undercapitalized risk retention group with no guaranty fund behind it accomplishes it whether or not anybody designed it to.

I’ve never handed over a parking receipt and felt good about it. It doesn’t buy peace of mind, and it never did. It buys a known, small, certain cost in place of an unknown, large, uncertain one, which is the definition of financing a risk. Every layer stacked above it is that same purchase at a denomination somebody else picked, and the further up you go, the less say you have in the price.

On July 23, a Dallas County jury returned a $604 million advisory verdict against C.H. Robinson, motor carrier Lupus Superior LLC, and its driver in Lipe v. Lupus Superior. The case comes out of a March 2021 crash on Interstate 20 in Mississippi, where a Lupus Superior tractor-trailer ran into stopped traffic and set off a six-vehicle pileup that caught fire. Jennifer Lipe, Benjamin Brewer, and Rhoderick Coleman died in their vehicles. Rodney Hawkins and Gabrielle Broussard were injured. All three of the people who died left children behind, and the plaintiffs were represented by Arnold & Itkin.

The precision is the story, not the headline. The verdict is advisory and compensatory, not punitive, and it hasn’t been finalized by the court. C.H. Robinson disclosed it in an 8-K and says it will appeal if the verdict is entered as final. The jury apportioned Robinson’s several share as a broker at $139 million. The path from $139 million to the full $604 million runs through the jury’s finding that treated the broker as the employer of the third-party carrier’s driver, which pulls the driver’s share onto Robinson’s balance sheet. That employer treatment is where the appeal will live. Stephens’ first look Friday morning framed it exactly that way, and noted that even a settlement well below the verdict would exhaust the company’s entire auto liability tower on a single claim. The market cap is $24 billion. The auto liability program is not built for nine-figure single claims because, until fourteen months ago, the legal system did not produce nine-figure single claims against brokers.

I have no role in the Lipe case. I do work on both sides of the expert witness fence, but most know I generally only take defense work unless it’s some egregious plaintiff case. I’m an expert witness or consultant retained in other CH Robinson cases where broker-liability matters, including a case in Ohio with plaintiff counsel Michael Leizerman, and I worked on the CBS Sunday Morning piece this spring that put C.H. Robinson’s carrier vetting on camera, after the 60 Minutes Super Ego investigation I contributed to in April. The parallels between the cases I do work and the one I don’t are constant. They are the same case with different names on the caption. Super Ego-related carriers, led by Twin Carrier, appear in the roadside inspection data hauling C.H. Robinson-annotated freight more often than nearly any other operation in the pool, and the same names surface across the carrier histories of the margin-based spot market brokers generally.

Fourteen months from Montgomery to a verdict

On May 14, 2026, the Supreme Court decided Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC, 9 to 0, Justice Barrett writing. A negligent-hiring claim against a freight broker is not preempted by the FAAAA, because the safety exception at 49 U.S.C. 14501(c)(2)(A) preserves state authority to regulate safety with respect to motor vehicles, and requiring a broker to exercise ordinary care in picking the truck concerns motor vehicles. Justice Kavanaugh, joined by Justice Alito, wrote separately that the case was closer than the majority let on, then landed in the same place: “Truck safety is a matter of life and death.” The Seventh Circuit’s Ye v. GlobalTranz line, the industry’s preemption shield since 2023, stopped being good law that morning. When I wrote about the pending decision in April, the question was whether the people who select the carriers bear any responsibility for who they select. The answer arrived in May. The invoice arrived Wednesday, and it is the first verdict against C.H. Robinson since the Court cleared the path.

The standard now is ordinary care, and ordinary care is measured against what you could have known. That is why the carrier’s file matters more than the crash itself.

What the Lupus Superior file actually says

Lupus Superior LLC, DOT 2370470, MC 816979, runs out of Grand Prairie, Texas with 23 power units and 27 drivers. Its FMCSA safety rating is Satisfactory, and per the Transportation Intermediaries Association’s own statement on this verdict, that rating has stood since 2014 and was reaffirmed as recently as this past April. Hold that thought, because a Satisfactory rating is a status, not a pattern. The status says a compliance review at some point found the carrier adequate. The pattern lives in the roadside data, and the roadside data on this carrier reads differently.

The federal crash file on this DOT number logs 26 crashes since 2013, seven fatalities, and fifteen injuries, including the March 25, 2021 Warren County, Mississippi crash at issue in Lipe, a 2017 fatal in Rockwall, Texas, a 2023 fatal in Texas, and a December 2024 crash in Hempstead County, Arkansas with one dead and four injured. At the time of this week’s verdict, the carrier’s estimated BASIC measures sit above FMCSA intervention thresholds in two categories, Unsafe Driving and Hours-of-Service Compliance, which matches what has been publicly reported about the case. Its 24-month vehicle out-of-service rate runs 28.6% against a national average around 21. The recent violation history is the ordinary grammar of a fleet under strain: speeding 11 to 14 over, three times since mid-2024; a seatbelt violation in December; tires leaking below half inflation pressure placed out of service, inoperative brake lamps placed out of service, a flat with fabric exposed placed out of service, and a run of ELD paperwork violations. The insurance filing is $750,000 in BIPD primary coverage, the federal minimum set in the early 1980s, written by an insurer our platform tiers as high risk, and the docket history on MC 816979 shows 28 authority actions over thirteen years, the bulk of them involuntary revocations followed by reinstatement, the churn signature of coverage lapsing and getting cured. Seven distinct insurers appear in the recent filing history. Insurers who look closely do not stay, or do not stay cheap, and the carrier finds another one. That is measured. Every item in this paragraph comes from public federal records that were sitting there before the freight moved.

The equipment tells its story. Inspection records tie 50 VINs on this authority to 17 other carriers. Twenty-seven of those shared VINs connect to a single Dallas operation called M & J Superior LLC, DOT 2487937, and more connect to SHOX LLC, registered in the same Grand Prairie. The same Volvo tractors and Wabash trailers show up under different DOT numbers in different states across the same time window. Shared equipment in inspection records is an observed fact. It does not by itself establish common ownership, affiliation, or wrongdoing, and I am not asserting any of those things about these companies. What it establishes is that a broker running a real vetting process would have questions after seeing that shared data, because equipment moving between authorities is the raw material of the reincarnation problem this industry calls chameleon carriers, and the pattern is checkable in about the time it takes to pour a coffee. In my system, you can bulk-drop 2000 VINs and plates, and it’ll give you a list in under a minute of every plate that’s run under every VIN for every carrier it touched, when, where, and how often. In some cases we see 13 plate swaps on 1 VIN across 8 carriers in six months.

The dataset behind the anecdote

In April I published an analysis of 923 carriers documented in C.H. Robinson’s carrier history through FMCSA roadside inspection records, the dataset behind the 60 Minutes and CBS reporting. Those records exist because when an officer stops a truck with a load on board, the inspection captures the carrier, the shipper, and the freight parties off the bill of lading. Nobody self-reports it. I refreshed that pull today. Of the 923 carriers, 30 had fatal crashes in the trailing 24 months, and the fatality count attached to those carriers has climbed from 46 in April to 50 now. Fifty deaths is not a rate or a model output. It is a body count inside one broker’s documented carrier pool, counted since spring. Six hundred ninety-nine of the 923, 76%, have never received a safety rating of any kind. One hundred thirty-two run vehicle out-of-service rates at or above 50%, 74 run driver out-of-service rates at or above 50%, and six carry authority transfer flags from our cross-reference analysis. A separate pull of raw inspection records from February 2023 through January of this year shows 3,433 roadside inspections where a C.H. Robinson entity appears as the annotated shipper or freight party, spread across 2,277 distinct carriers, with 644 of those inspections producing at least one out-of-service violation and 563 carriers going out of service at least once while hauling that annotated freight. Matching those DOT numbers to current carrier records identifies 2,163 carriers, and the ratings distribution remains the same shape as the smaller set: 1,625 of the 2,163 (75%) have no safety rating at all. Fifty-four currently hold a Conditional rating and one holds an Unsatisfactory rating, and seventeen of those Conditional or Unsatisfactory carriers appear in the inspection data hauling annotated freight in 2025 or later, the most recent on January 21 of this year. The ratings shown are the carriers’ current ratings, not necessarily the rating on the day of the stop, so I will state only what the records state. Conditional is the exact rating Caribe Transport held when C.H. Robinson tendered it the load that took Shawn Montgomery’s leg, and the exact fact pattern the Supreme Court just held a jury gets to weigh.

To see the list of carriers that have been inspected roadside with CHR as a shipper, you can go here and search that.

Some of the names in the fatal-crash column are large fleets whose raw counts reflect scale, and per-unit rates are the way to read a 400-crash number at a 10,000-truck carrier. The names that should stop a load are the small ones. Twin Carrier LLC out of Georgia, DOT 3518735, now shows 59 crashes in 24 months, two fatal, two people dead, unrated, insured at $1,000 on a canceled filing, and it appears 21 times between June 2023 and November 2025 in the roadside data hauling freight annotated to C.H. Robinson. Twin Carrier is the oldest and primary carrier in the Super Ego network, with wrongful death litigation pending in Pennsylvania and Ohio. Koleaseco Inc of Michigan carries a fatal crash that killed four people in a single event, on a Satisfactory rating from a prior review. Fremont Trans of Kansas shows 53 crashes and three fatal events, unrated, on a canceled $1,000 filing. AD Express Trucking of Michigan shows 24 crashes and three dead, unrated, insured through Prime at a $750 filing that was canceled. Many unrated, with fatal crashes, with canceled minimum-limits filings from the bottom shelf of the trucking insurance market. Every one of these records was public before every one of these deaths.

The Carrier of the Year math, and who knew the network first

C.H. Robinson named Super Ego a Carrier of the Year and credited it with an operation of more than a thousand trucks. Super Ego Holding, the single entity, has never fielded a thousand units under its own authority. The only way you get to that number is consolidation, adding up the fleet counts across the constellation of related entities that federal investigators, myself, other litigators, and the 60 Minutes team spent a year mapping. I can’t tell you how Robinson arrived at its figure. Robinson can, and a plaintiff’s lawyer in the Pennsylvania and Ohio Twin Carrier cases can ask, because a broker that counted the network’s trucks for an award has a hard time later claiming it could not see the network.

There is a second party that maps these networks earlier and better than any journalist, and it is the factoring companies. Super Ego’s freight bills run through Triumph, which means Triumph can explain how C.H. Robinson pays those invoices and where the money lands across the operating entities. The mechanism is that, before the bodies drop, the factors already know who is associated with whom, because that is how they protect their money. A factor perfecting its interest in a carrier’s receivables files a UCC-1 financing statement naming the debtor entities, and those filings are public record in the state registries. The affiliation map that takes an investigative team months to build from inspection records exists in the lien filings on day one, drawn by the people with the strongest financial incentive to draw it accurately. None of that is an allegation against any factor. Factoring is legal; the liens are them doing their job. The point is narrower and worse for the brokerage industry: the knowledge exists, it is written down, it is filed with secretaries of state, and “we had no way to know these carriers were connected” gets harder to say under oath when the payment rail knew.

The relationships tighten the loop further, and every piece of this is on the record. C.H. Robinson vets its carriers through Highway. Highway’s CEO is Jordan Graft, who previously ran TriumphPay, the payments network inside Triumph Financial, where his brother Aaron Graft is CEO. In April 2023, TriumphPay and Highway announced a strategic data partnership, combining TriumphPay’s freight-spend and payments data with Highway’s carrier identity and equipment data to catch double-brokering. Two brothers, two companies, one announced data pipeline: one verifies the carrier at the front door, the other moves and finances the money behind it. I am not suggesting anything improper about that arrangement; fighting payment fraud is exactly what those datasets should be combined for. The observation is about capability. The vetting layer and the payment layer of this industry have publicly demonstrated they can join their data and map which carriers and entities tie together, right down to who is hauling more freight than their equipment could physically allow. The capability exists when the money is at risk. What we should be doing as an industry is vetting carriers for entry on a load as diligently as we vet them to file UCC liens protecting factor money.

What vetting looked like when we asked on the record

For the CBS Sunday Morning piece this spring, we asked C.H. Robinson on the record what a carrier has to do to get hired. The answer, in substance, was clear: Highway’s screening. So we called Highway and asked what their screening requires, and the answer, in substance, was that the criteria are up to C.H. Robinson, and what Highway itself confirms is that the carrier has authority, a DOT number, and insurance on file. Follow that loop around one full turn. The broker points to the vendor, the vendor points back to the broker, and what actually gets verified at the bottom of the stack is the same three boxes I wrote about in April: authority active, MC active, certificate on file. The identity-verification layer the industry added is real, and it matters for fraud. It does not answer the safety question, because it was never built to. A carrier can clear every identity check ever devised and still be a 23-truck operation with seven fatalities in its crash file, two alerting BASICs, and a $750,000 minimum filing from its seventh insurer in recent memory. Compliant is a status. Safe is a pattern. Defensible is a record of your own diligence, and after Wednesday, defensible is the only one of the three a jury will grade you on.

What’s most telling to me about broker vetting is that many of these brokers saw no real need to vet any more than they absolutely had to; prior to Montgomery, the carrier histories in this article show exactly that. That means brokers are now changing course to accommodate a judicial mandate that they vet carriers better. Prior to that judicial mandate, why didn’t brokers find it morally or ethically appropriate to vet the carriers and to perform as much due diligence as possible?

The litigation footprint was already there for anyone who pulled it. A PACER party search I ran today returns 253 federal party records for C.H. Robinson entities, 194 civil cases, 136 of them with Robinson as a defendant, stretching from the 2004 Joliet potato-load verdict through Miller in the Ninth Circuit to a dozen open matters filed in the last eighteen months. The company has been litigating the question of what it owes for carrier selection for twenty years. What changed in May is that the preemption exit closed, and what changed Wednesday is that a Dallas County jury put a number on the open question. My question is: why did we need a judicial mandate to compel what should’ve been our own logical, moral, ethical responsibility for who we put on the highways?

What the money says

The financial arithmetic explains why this verdict lands harder than its appeal odds suggest. C.H. Robinson trades around $205 with a $24 billion market cap, and the stock slipped about 2 percent premarket Friday on the 8-K. Wall Street expects the company to earn roughly $6 a share this year across about 118 million shares, call it a bit over $700 million in net income. The full $604 million is most of a year’s profit. The $139 million several share alone approaches a quarter’s worth. Sell-side analysis published Friday put the company’s auto liability tower at a $10 million retention under $135 million in limits, which means even a settlement in the low-to-mid nine figures exhausts the entire program on one claim. That tower was sized for a world where the preemption defense held and broker exposure ended at nuisance value. That world ended May 14. Every excess and contingent auto underwriter writing brokerage risk is re-running their models this quarter, and the renewal conversations will not be about premium first. They will be about the vetting file, because the underwriter’s exposure now runs through the same ordinary-care question the jury answers, and underwriters, unlike regulators, can decline the account. Insurance is about to become the enforcement mechanism the safety rating system never was.

Then there is the question of who actually writes the check, because three defendants share this verdict and only one of them can pay it. Lupus Superior’s filed coverage is $750,000, the federal minimum, so the carrier’s insurer is good for roughly one-eighth of one percent of the number, and a 23-truck LLC has no balance sheet behind the policy. The driver has less. Under Texas proportionate responsibility rules, a defendant generally pays its own apportioned share unless its responsibility crosses the 50 percent bar, and the route around that math here is the employer finding: if Robinson is treated as the driver’s employer, the driver’s share lands on Robinson, and Robinson’s is the only balance sheet in the caption that exists. Most people watching this case will say the multi-billion-dollar entity pays because it has the funds, and they’re right, but the deeper point is that the outcome was engineered decades ago. The $750,000 minimum has sat unchanged since 1980, which is about $2.9 million in today’s dollars going the other direction, and it guarantees that in any catastrophic crash involving a minimum-limits carrier, the policy exhausts before the funerals are paid for and the recovery moves up the chain to whoever selected the carrier and can satisfy a judgment. For thirty years the brokerage model captured the margin of the cheap carrier while the cheap carrier’s empty policy capped everyone’s practical exposure. Montgomery moved the uncovered remainder onto the entity that captured the margin, and Lipe is the first demonstration of what that transfer looks like at scale.

That is measured. This next part is my read. The stock ran from a 52-week low of $95 to over $200 on an operating-margin story, and part of the margin in spot market brokerage is the spread between what the shipper pays and what the cheapest available carrier will take. The data in this article is what the cheapest available carrier looks like. Montgomery attached liability to the spread, and Lipe put a price on it, which means some portion of the margin the market has been capitalizing at 34 times earnings was never margin at all. It was unpriced risk, carried by the people in the other lane, and the repricing of that risk back onto the balance sheets that earned it is what this verdict starts.

If you broker freight, your carrier file became your court file fourteen months ago, and the Lipe verdict is the first invoice priced under the new standard. The data you will be examined against is public, it is cheap, and it is timestamped, which means the only fact in dispute at your trial will be whether you looked. If you run a shipper’s carrier qualification program, the same discovery requests are coming for your routing guide, because the ordinary-care logic doesn’t stop at the broker’s desk. The Tennessee owner-operator from my April piece got a $312 check from an exhausted bond. The families in Lipe got a verdict that will spend years on appeal. The next case gets decided by whichever party kept the better file, and for the first time in the history of this industry, that is more likely to be the plaintiff.

The Lipe verdict is advisory, subject to post-trial proceedings, and C.H. Robinson has said it will appeal a final judgment; a verdict is not a final adjudication of liability. Carrier data cited above comes from public FMCSA sources (MCMIS inspection and crash records, SAFER, L&I filings, SMS output) as aggregated by Tea Technologies’ Highway Intelligence & Risk Platform, and reflects the carriers’ own records, not safety events attributable to any broker or shipper. Shared-equipment and network observations describe records, not conclusions about ownership or conduct. Earnings and market figures reflect publicly reported prices and consensus estimates as of July 24, 2026, and nothing here is investment advice. Nothing here is a legal conclusion about any party or pending matter. Verify critical carrier status against official FMCSA systems before making business decisions.

A federal grand jury in the Western District of Tennessee returned a 12-defendant indictment on May 21. It was filed under seal and unsealed on July 21. Case number 2:26-cr-20217. The charge is conspiracy to transport stolen goods in interstate commerce under 18 U.S.C. 371, with a substantive count under 18 U.S.C. 2314 against the lead defendant. The government is seeking a forfeiture money judgment of at least $2 million.

The target was Nike’s North American Logistics Center in Memphis. NALC is where imported Nike product lands before it goes out to sellers. It is one of the highest-value concentrations of consumer goods in the American distribution network.

Here is how the government says it worked.

Mechanics

Somebody on the outside decided which product they wanted. Somebody on the inside found it in the building and put a shipping label on the carton addressed to a location the outside group controlled. UPS picked it up as ordinary outbound freight. Nobody stopped it because, from the system’s point of view, nothing unusual happened. A carton got scanned, and it went where the label said it was going.

Roy Harvey Jr., 39, of Los Angeles, is named as the lead. He set up a business called RHJ Global in 2020 using his parents’ address in Memphis. He created UPS labels for predetermined destinations and got them to employees inside NALC. He kept some of the shoes and resold the rest.

Michael Perkins was a floor manager at NALC. According to the indictment, he brought labels into the facility and handed them to four other employees, Julian Baker, Cortez Spencer, Roderico McClellan and Damon Johnson, who applied them to the specified cartons.

Keith Cannon opened a UPS account using the business information of a company called Valid Kixx, created labels, and directed shipments to Racine, Wisconsin, and to an address in Charlestown, Indiana, associated with Marquesio Robinson, who had previously worked at the Nike Employee Store. Robinson registered an LLC called Timetrav3lers to open a bank account and move money to Cannon and Harvey. Cadarian Mack listed shoes for sale on StockX and GOAT and took payment through PayPal.

On the buy side, three resellers. Joel Deluna owned Chicago Emporium. Bereket Abraham co-owns Cool Kicks on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles, a shop known for selling high-end sneakers to celebrities. Jorge Cuellar owned Horhead Investments, another Los Angeles reseller.

The label counts in the overt acts are the part I keep going back to. Harvey received 149 labels from Cool Kicks between July 23, 2021, and May 5, 2022. Harvey and his co-conspirators successfully used 1,860 labels between May 22, 2022, and Jan. 27, 2024. Cannon created 459 that were used between April 2023 and the end of January 2024. After a pause, Cannon started printing again around March 26, 2024, and roughly 800 more of his labels moved product between April 23 and June 19 of that year. 3,100 labels.

The money moved: Horhead Investments wired $696,700 to a Memphis food truck called R&Beef Dawgz, owned by Cannon, between April 2023 and January 2024. Chicago Emporium paid Cannon approximately $492,000 between April and June 2024. Cool Kicks paid Cannon $127,000 and Harvey $88,275 between April and November 2023. LAPD and the FBI say the buyers paid the inside group more than $900,000 in total. In September 2022, Harvey asked Abraham to create a fake invoice so he could take delivery of cartons from UPS, and the indictment says Abraham created it and sent it.

On Jan. 27, 2024, LAPD arrested Harvey in Los Angeles after he took delivery of 27 cartons of Nike shoes bearing his labels. Nike interviewed Perkins and placed him on administrative leave.

Perkins then quit, and according to the indictment, he kept distributing labels to Baker, Spencer, McClellan and Johnson at least through the end of the indictment period in June 2024.

The company identified the insider, pulled him off the floor, and he continued to feed labels into the building for months afterward. The theft did not stop when the manager left. It stopped when federal agents made it stop. The control that mattered was not badge access or camera coverage. It was whether anyone in the chain could tell an authentic label from a fabricated one, and nobody could, because a label is just a barcode and a barcode is just an assertion.

The LAPD Commercial Crimes Division Cargo Theft Task Force and the Memphis FBI ran this jointly. Harvey, Abraham and Cuellar were arrested on federal warrants June 22 and 23 and appeared in federal court in Los Angeles.

All 12 defendants are presumed innocent. These are allegations in a charging document, not proven facts.

The wider picture

Cargo theft is not what it was five years ago, and the numbers show the shift.

Verisk CargoNet recorded 3,594 supply chain crime events across the United States and Canada in 2025, essentially flat against 3,607 in 2024. Estimated losses jumped roughly 60% to nearly $725 million, and average value per theft rose 36% to $273,990. Confirmed cargo theft incidents inside that total rose 18%, from 2,243 to 2,646.

Flat volume, exploding value. That is not opportunistic crime getting luckier. That is targeting.

The 2026 data continues the trend. First quarter events were down 5.3% year over year at 767, with $131.58 million in estimated losses. By the end of June, first-half losses had already passed $359 million, with average stolen commodity value climbing to about $341,518.

What is getting stolen has changed too. Copper, molybdenum, antimony, tungsten and zinc on the metals side. RAM modules, storage drives, fiber-optic transceivers, and enterprise server blades on the electronics side. Not televisions. Not consumer goods. Components with deep, anonymous secondary markets and no serial-number tracing that anyone bothers to run.

The geography moved. Among the top eight states, most declined year over year in Q1 2026. Two did not. California went from 255 incidents to 277. New Jersey went from 27 to 59, a 119% jump. CargoNet’s read is that domestic groups in Texas and the Southeast pulled back while organized networks tied to California and the New York metro grew.

Strategic theft is now the main event

The category that matters is what the FBI calls strategic cargo theft: using deception rather than force to get freight handed over voluntarily. Identity theft, fictitious pickups, account takeovers, double brokering, fraudulent carriers.

Travelers put the growth of strategic theft at nearly 1,500% between 2022 and 2024. Fictitious pickups went from an average of about 66 a year between 2012 and 2022 to 576 in 2023 alone.

The prosecutions have started catching up.

On June 3, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg announced an eight-defendant indictment, case IND-71638-26, charging a ring that allegedly operated from October 2025 through April 2026 and stole nearly $5 million in goods from logistics sites in Pennsylvania, Virginia and New Jersey. The method was straightforward. Hacker groups obtained winning bid information for real freight tenders. The ring leased tractors, affixed the name and registration number of the legitimate carrier that was supposed to make the pickup, drove to the facility and took the load. In February, they allegedly took 43,100 pounds of copper rod out of a Newark logistics center while impersonating a real carrier, drove it to the Bronx and sold most of it to a Brooklyn scrap yard. The tally across six thefts: $3.3 million in cigarettes, $432,000 in cheese, $295,000 in beef, more than $266,000 in copper, $165,000 in lamb.

On June 30, the Southern District of New York unsealed charges against eight more people in what prosecutors called an international network, alleging $10 million in cargo stolen from commercial shippers since March 2023, coordinated by at least one dispatcher located overseas with facilitators, drivers and warehouse workers in the United States.

In the Northern District of Illinois, Aivaras Zigmantas was sentenced to five years after pleading guilty to wire fraud in December 2025. Prosecutors said he used multiple aliases between 2020 and 2023 to impersonate real and fictitious carriers and brokers, intending to steal at least $14.6 million in freight and successfully took more than $10.1 million. Liquor and commercial-grade copper.

Amazon, which has more visibility into this than most, participates in 14 state organized retail crime task forces and says one of its investigations produced a federal indictment on 13 counts of wire fraud specifically for stealing carrier identities and submitting fraudulent invoices. Highway, a carrier identity platform, reported blocking nearly 2 million fraudulent email attempts and 8.5 million spoofed phone numbers in 2025.

The new vectors

Two developments from this year deserve more attention than they are getting.

The first is phone system compromise. CargoNet has observed criminal groups compromising software-based business phone systems, which allows a remote actor to place and receive calls from a motor carrier’s verified phone numbers and, in some cases, monitor active calls. Think about what that defeats. Every carrier vetting workflow in the industry includes a callback to a verified number. That control is now beatable. The same groups are using remote access tools, credential compromise, and social engineering to get themselves added as authorized users on a legitimate carrier’s own accounts. At the moment, a broker is deciding whether to tender a load; everything checks out, because the fraud actor is operating from inside the carrier’s real infrastructure.

The second is that criminal networks have stopped bothering to impersonate carriers and started buying them. CargoNet reports networks purchasing legitimate motor carrier businesses through social media, peer-to-peer marketplaces, and specialized brokerage services. The sales are frequent and essentially unregulated. If you own an authority and somebody offers you money for it, understand what you may be selling and what liability may follow you.

Anti-fraud tooling in this industry actually worked. That is why the criminals moved upstream. They stopped attacking the load and started attacking the identity.

Clones and chameleons

Which brings me back to cloned trucks and identity theft. A cloned truck is a tractor running another carrier’s DOT number and name. A chameleon carrier is a company that re-registers under a new DOT number with substantially the same people, equipment, and phone numbers, so the crashes, out-of-service orders, and enforcement history stay attached to the corpse of the old entity. Both are identity attacks. Both work because verification happens once, badly, at a moment when there is nothing to verify against.

GAO’s 2012 report on this, GAO-12-364, found that applicants with chameleon attributes were three times more likely than other new applicants to be involved in a severe crash, 18% against 6%. GAO recommended that FMCSA expand risk-based vetting beyond passenger and household goods carriers. FMCSA submitted a report to Congress in June 2013 describing a proof of concept for automated application screening, to be expanded with the Unified Registration System, resources permitting.

That was thirteen years ago. USR became MOTUS. MOTUS is rolling out through 2026 with identity verification and business verification at registration. FMCSA is also tightening principal place of business enforcement, which matters because a mailbox cannot be audited. Under 49 CFR 386.73, the agency can issue out-of-service orders and record consolidation orders against reincarnated entities and affiliates. Rep. Harriet Hageman introduced the SAFE Act in February to go after the same problem legislatively.

Better late is still better, but there are more than two million registered motor carriers, and the throughput problem GAO flagged in 2012 has not changed. You cannot manually investigate tens of thousands of new applicants a year, and if the screening is automated, it is only as good as the entity resolution behind it.

The through line

I have written three pieces this week about what look like three different crimes.

Somebody drives a Malibu into the side of a tractor-trailer on I-10, and a law firm turns it into a seven-figure settlement. Somebody declares one truck on an instant-issue policy and runs 600 VINs across 40 states until the policy lapses at day 92. Somebody leases a day cab, tapes a real carrier’s name and DOT number to the door, and drives 43,000 pounds of copper out of a gate in New Jersey.

Different crimes. Same hole. At every one of those points, a system took somebody’s word about who they were. The responding officer took the passengers’ word about who was driving. The insurer took the applicant’s word about how many trucks it ran. The shipping clerk took the label’s word about where the carton was going, and the dock guard took the placard’s word about which carrier had shown up.

We built a national freight network on identity assertions and then spent twenty years automating away the humans who used to check them. Every fraud in this business now runs through that gap, whether the payload is a fake soft-tissue injury, an unscheduled 80,000-pound truck, or a trailer of enterprise server blades.

The Nike case will end with verdicts, but the ceiling on what enforcement can accomplish is set by how long it takes to notice. Roy Harvey Jr. got arrested in January 2024, and the labels kept flowing through June. Operation Sideswipe took seven years and a murdered witness. The one-truck carriers cycle to a new authority in 90 days.

Prosecution is what happens after the loss. Verification is what happens instead of it. We keep funding the first one and arguing about the second.

Part III. What Good Looks Like

9. Twenty minutes in the yard

Everything in the federal record is downstream of the yard. The inspection data, the crash history, the out-of-service rate, all of it’s the paper shadow of physical decisions somebody made about trucks, drivers, and money, months before enforcement ever saw the result. When I walk a yard for an underwriter, I’m not gathering different information than the roadside record holds. I’m gathering it earlier, before it becomes a violation, and I’m gathering the parts the roadside record structurally can’t capture. Twenty minutes on the ground tells you things that two hours in the data won’t, and the order you look at them in matters.

Start before you get out of the truck. The gate and the fence line tell you whether anybody thinks the equipment is worth protecting. A yard full of loaded trailers behind a chain that anybody with bolt cutters owns is a cargo theft claim that hasn’t happened yet, and it’s also a statement about how the company thinks about risk generally, because physical security is the cheapest risk control there is and they didn’t buy it.

Walk the dead line first, not the active equipment. Every yard has one: the row of trailers and tractors nobody has moved in months, and the dead line is the maintenance program’s confession. Look at what’s sitting there and why. Blown moon roofs, flat-spotted tires, trailers with the doors roped shut. A carrier that cannibalizes its dead line for parts is a carrier managing cash, not maintenance, and you’ll find the results of that management in the vehicle out-of-service rate about six months from now. The deadline also tells you fleet age honestly, which the MCS-150 doesn’t.

Then look at the tires on the live equipment, because tires are money and money is the truth. Matched tires at legal tread on the drive axles cost real dollars and mean somebody is spending on the thing that touches the road. Recaps on steer axles, mixed brands worn to different depths on the same tandem, weather cracking on trailer tires: each one is a maintenance interval that got skipped, and each one is visible from ten feet away without a gauge. You can read a maintenance budget off a tandem faster than off a financial statement.

The shop, if there’s a shop, answers the program question. A real preventive maintenance operation has work orders you can see, a parts room with an inventory system, fluids stored like somebody expects an EPA visit, and a torque wrench that’s been calibrated within the last year. Ask when the last PM was done on any unit you point at, and watch whether the answer comes from a system or from memory. A carrier that outsources all maintenance isn’t disqualified; plenty of good small fleets run that way, but then the question moves to the vendor invoices and whether repair closure is verified or assumed.

Watch the people, last and longest. Who walks up to you and how fast tells you whether anybody owns the yard. Drivers doing real pre-trips versus drivers doing walk-arounds with a coffee tell you whether the inspection culture is practice or paperwork. The dispatch office wall tells you what gets measured, because companies post what they care about, and a wall covered in revenue-per-truck with no safety scoreboard anywhere tells you its priorities are in laminate.

None of this is available to a broker covering a load at 4:45 on a Friday, and that’s fine. The yard walk is Tier 3 work, the underwriting depth, the thing you do for core carriers, dedicated freight, and any account you’re about to write. The reason it belongs in this guide anyway is that everything the data shows you is a proxy for what the yard would show you, and once you’ve walked enough yards, you read the data differently. A high vehicle out-of-service rate stops being a statistic and becomes the dead line you can picture. The carrier profile becomes a photograph of a place, and you get much harder to fool.

10. Driver qualification that’s real versus a file cabinet

The regulation is 49 CFR Part 391, and the industry has spent fifty years learning to satisfy it without performing it. A driver qualification file is a folder with roughly a dozen required items: the application, the motor vehicle record pulled at hire and annually after, the road test or its equivalent, the medical certificate, the previous employer inquiries, and the annual review of the driving record. Every audit checks that the folder exists and the items are in it. Almost nothing checks whether any of it was an actual decision.

The difference between a real DQ process and a file cabinet is whether anything in the file could ever cause a no. Pull ten files at a carrier and read them as a set. If every application shows the driver was hired within a day or two of applying, the previous employer inquiries came back after the hire date, and no file in the building documents a rejected applicant, the process is a formality that has never stopped anyone. A real process leaves evidence of friction: an applicant file marked declined, an MVR that triggered a conditional hire with a documented restriction, a road test with actual scored deficiencies instead of a checked box.

The annual MVR review is where the paper and the road part company most reliably, and it’s the contradiction I look for first because it’s the one the roadside record can confirm or destroy. A carrier that certifies it reviews every driver’s record annually, while its inspection history shows a steady stream of driver violations from the same CDL numbers, has a review process that reads records and does nothing about them. That gap, between the attested control and the observed outcome, is the single most useful credibility test in the entire assessment, because it doesn’t require you to judge the program. The program judged itself.

The drug and alcohol program has the same split. The regulation requires pre-employment testing, random testing at prescribed rates, and queries against the FMCSA Drug and Alcohol Clearinghouse at hire and annually. A real program produces a paper trail of random selections generated by a third party on a schedule the carrier doesn’t control. A cosmetic one produces round numbers, tests clustered in the same week each quarter, and a Clearinghouse query log with gaps. The Clearinghouse matters more than the industry has absorbed: since 2020 it’s the national record of violations and return-to-duty status, and a carrier that isn’t querying it annually is certifying drivers it hasn’t checked against the one database built to catch the drivers who move.

Turnover is the number that explains everything else, and it isn’t in any federal record. Truckload turnover at large carriers has run near or above 90% annually for most of two decades, and at the bottom of the market it exceeds 100%, which means the average seat changes occupants more than once a year. A carrier at that churn rate has no accumulated knowledge of its drivers, is perpetually hiring, and is under perpetual pressure to lower the bar to fill trucks. Ask the turnover number directly. A carrier that knows it, tracks it, and can tell you what it was last year and what they changed is managing the thing. A carrier that doesn’t know it is being managed by it.

11. Maintenance as a program

The regulation is Part 396 and it asks for systematic inspection, repair, and maintenance. The word doing the work in that sentence is systematic, and it’s the word that separates the two kinds of carriers you’ll meet.

A reactive operation fixes trucks when they break or when a roadside inspection makes them. Its maintenance record is a stack of repair invoices with no pattern, its vehicle out-of-service rate runs above the national average, which has sat in the low twenty percent range for years, and its violations skew toward the things that fail gradually and visibly: brakes out of adjustment, tires, lights, air leaks. Brake and tire violations are the tell because nothing about them is sudden. A brake goes out of adjustment over weeks. A carrier whose trucks routinely get caught with them at roadside is a carrier where nobody is looking between breakdowns, and the roadside inspector has become the maintenance department.

A systematic operation runs preventive maintenance on intervals, and the intervals are enforced by something other than good intentions. Units get flagged by mileage or engine hours, a work order opens, the work gets done, and somebody verifies closure before the unit dispatches. The three questions that expose whether the system is real: what’s the PM interval, what happens when a unit blows through it, and who has the authority to hold a truck out of service against a load that’s already booked. That third one is the governance question wearing coveralls, and the answer predicts the out-of-service rate better than the out-of-service rate predicts itself.

Driver vehicle inspection reports close the loop, or they don’t. The regulation requires drivers to report defects and carriers to certify repair before the next dispatch when the defect affects safety. In a functioning program, DVIRs with defects trigger work orders, and you can trace a reported defect to a completed repair with dates that make sense. In a broken one, every DVIR in the building says no defects found, which isn’t evidence of good equipment. It’s evidence that drivers learned reporting defects gets them nothing but delay, and the carrier has built a system for not knowing about its own trucks.

For the broker or shipper who’ll never see any of this, the public proxies are the vehicle out-of-service rate against the national baseline, the violation mix skewing toward brakes and tires, and the trend over the trailing two years rather than the lifetime aggregate. A carrier trending down after a bad stretch is a different risk than one trending up from a clean baseline, and the trend is the part a snapshot check throws away.

12. Hours, ELDs, and the ghost co-driver

The electronic logging device mandate took effect in December 2017, and the industry story since has been that falsification ended when paper logs died. Falsification didn’t end. It professionalized.

The old fraud was a second paper logbook. The new frauds are built on how the ELD actually works, and you can’t spot them without knowing the mechanics. An ELD records driving time automatically off the engine, which is the part everyone understands. What it can’t do is verify who’s driving, and that gap produced the ghost co-driver: a second driver login, sometimes a real person who isn’t in the truck, sometimes an account invented from a compliant-looking CDL, that absorbs driving time so the actual driver’s record stays legal. One person drives fourteen hours, the log shows a team operation splitting it, and the paper is perfect. The tells are in the data if anybody looks: co-driver logins with no corresponding payroll, team operations where the second driver never appears on a roadside inspection, duty status changes that happen at highway speed.

The cruder versions are still everywhere. Unassigned drive time is the ELD’s honesty mechanism: the miles the device recorded with nobody logged in, and it’s supposed to be annotated and assigned. A carrier with chronic unassigned miles has drivers logging out to move the truck. Personal conveyance, the off-duty driving status meant for getting to a motel, has become the elastic category, with trucks moving hundreds of loaded miles in personal conveyance because the status doesn’t burn clock. Yard moves, malfunctions claimed at convenient moments, edits requested and approved by the same office login at midnight: every one of these lives in the ELD back office data, and none of it appears in any public record until it becomes a roadside violation.

What a carrier with real hours discipline looks like from outside: hours-of-service violations rare and clerical rather than substantive, no pattern of driving-after-hours or false-log findings, and, when you can see it, an operation whose transit commitments are physically achievable. That last one is a check brokers skip and shouldn’t. A carrier that accepts a 1,100-mile run for tomorrow morning with a solo driver has told you, at tender, that somebody is going to break the rule, and you accepted the answer. Dispatch math is the hours audit you can run from your desk, and after a crash, the transit time you demanded is in the plaintiff’s exhibit list either way.

13. Governance

Every program in this part reduces to one question: can the safety function tell the revenue function no, and survive it? Everything else is architecture around that answer.

You can find the answer in an org chart before you find it anywhere else. Where safety reports tells you what it is. A safety director reporting to operations is a compliance clerk, because the person who owns the freight owns them. A safety function reporting to ownership or a president, with documented authority to ground a truck, pull a driver, or refuse a load, is a control. Ask for the last time each of those authorities was actually used and what it cost. A carrier that can name the load it turned down last month has a safety program. A carrier that can’t has a safety manual.

Pay structure is governance written in numbers. A safety department bonused on revenue or on loads covered has been converted into a sales function with a different title. Drivers paid pure mileage with no detention or breakdown pay have been given a financial instruction to drive tired and skip the pre-trip, and no amount of posters in the break room outbids the pay plan. When I look at a compensation structure, I’m reading it as an instruction set, because that’s what it is. The company tells you what it wants by what it pays for, and the drivers heard it long before you asked.

Crash and claims discipline is the part an underwriter weighs heaviest, and the public record shows least. A carrier that does a real root cause review after an incident, preventable or not, and can show you what changed afterward, is running a learning loop. A carrier whose entire post-crash process is an insurance claim is running a payment loop. Ask what changed after the last serious incident. The good ones answer with a specific: a policy, a route, a piece of equipment, a termination. The rest answer with adjectives.

Size doesn’t decide this, and neither does sophistication. Some of the best-governed operations I’ve assessed were fifteen trucks with an owner who knew every driver’s family, held the line on maintenance because his name was on the door, and turned down freight that didn’t fit. Some of the worst had compliance departments, dashboards, and a safety culture deck, and a pay plan that unwound all of it every Friday. The org chart, the pay plan, and the last no. Those three tell you who’s actually driving the company, and the company that can’t answer them is being driven by whoever booked the next load.

Part IV. What the Losers Look Like

14. The chameleon

Same trucks, same people, new paper. That’s authority reincarnation, and the operator running the play is what the industry calls a chameleon carrier. The mechanics haven’t changed in twenty years because the incentive hasn’t: federal authority is cheap, history is expensive, and the system indexes history to the authority instead of to the people and the iron.

The play runs like this. A carrier accumulates violations, crashes, an intervention, a conditional rating, or an insurance market that won’t touch it at a survivable price. The principal forms a new entity, usually with a relative or an employee as the listed officer, obtains a new USDOT and MC number, moves the trucks and drivers over, and starts clean. The old authority dies by revocation or just goes dormant. The new one has no inspections, no crashes, no rating, and no history, and every compliance-only vetting tool in the market reads that absence as acceptable. The new entrant’s clean record is the product being manufactured.

FMCSA has known about this for a long time. A 2012 GAO report examined the problem and the agency’s ARCHI work, the algorithmic matching of new applicants against prior carriers, grew out of it, but enforcement capacity has never matched registration volume, and registration volume exploded after 2020. Screening for reincarnation is therefore a private diligence function, whether it should be or not, and it’s a solvable one, because the play leaves fingerprints at every layer of the anatomy from Part II.

The corporate layer: an entity formed weeks or months ago, holding fresh authority, at an address that housed another authority that died recently. Corporation younger than it has any reason to be, formation date against authority date against the death date of the neighbor. The people layer: officer names, and more usefully phone numbers and email addresses, shared with revoked or out-of-service carriers, because operators change company names far more often than they change cell phones. The iron layer: VINs inspected under the dead authority last year appearing under the new one this year, the physical fleet migrating across the paperwork. The service layer: BOC-3 process agent changes and clusters that track the same networks. No single tell convicts. Two or three together, on a new authority, aggressively soliciting freight, is a pattern, and the pattern is checkable before the first load in a way it never used to be.

The reason this section sits first in the losers part is that the chameleon defeats every other check you run. Its insurance is real, its authority is active, its record is clean, and every one of those facts is true of an entity that was constructed three months ago specifically so those facts would be true. Identity is the foundation check because until you know the carrier is who it says it is, and is the same operator it was last year, nothing else you verified means anything.

15. Ghost capacity, double-brokering, and the load that hauls itself

A carrier’s declared footprint is the most abused data in the industry, and the abuse has a purpose. Capacity that doesn’t exist is being sold every day, and the gap between what a carrier claims and what it physically runs is a leading indicator of fraud that almost nobody measures.

Start with the arithmetic nobody runs. A truck is good for roughly 100,000 to 120,000 miles a year run hard, which is two to three loaded long-haul moves a week sustained. A one-truck authority accepting forty loads a week isn’t a carrier. It’s a dispatch desk reselling your freight, and the reselling is the exposure, because the truck that actually shows up belongs to somebody nobody vetted. Power units against drivers against inspection volume against tendered volume: when those four numbers can’t describe the same physical operation, the operation you vetted isn’t the one moving the freight.

Double-brokering is the name for the resale, and the post-2020 version is industrialized. The classic version was a struggling carrier quietly re-brokering a load it couldn’t cover. The current version is organized: entities that obtain or purchase authority specifically to book freight and resell it, identity theft rings that impersonate legitimate carriers on load boards using spoofed emails and cloned MC numbers, and payment schemes where the fraudster collects from the broker while the actual hauling carrier, who thought it booked a legitimate load, never gets paid and liens the freight. Industry estimates put direct fraud losses in the hundreds of millions annually, and the number understates it because the liability exposure isn’t included. When the unvetted truck that actually hauled your load crashes, you selected that risk. You just did it blind, through an intermediary you didn’t know existed.

The controls are unglamorous, and they work at the point of physical custody, because paper identity is cheap and physical identity isn’t. Verify the contact channel against the carrier’s FMCSA-registered channel, not against the email that answered the posting, since the spoof lives in the reply-to. Confirm the truck, the driver name, and the unit number at dispatch, and match them at pickup. Watch the payment entity: a factoring assignment to a company that doesn’t match the carrier, a last-minute change in remittance, a carrier that’s oddly flexible about rate and oddly rigid about payment terms. Dormancy patterns matter here too. An authority that sat quiet for eighteen months and reactivated under new contacts with sudden volume is a shell that changed hands, and the record that made it look established belongs to a company that no longer exists in any meaningful sense.

The tell that costs nothing: the carrier that’s too easy. Available instantly for the hard lane, agreeable on rate, no questions about the freight, paperwork back in four minutes. Real trucks are scarce, and real carriers negotiate. A counterparty with frictionless everything is frictionless because it isn’t planning to do the part of the job that involves a truck.

16. The insurance tells

The industry checks insurance the way it checks a box: certificate on file, limits at a million, done. An underwriter reads the same file and sees six separate signals, and after a loss, a plaintiff’s lawyer reads it the way the underwriter does. This section is the underwriter’s read.

The certificate itself is the first misunderstanding. A certificate of insurance is a courtesy document generated by an agent, and it proves a policy existed at the moment of issuance, nothing more. The filing of record with FMCSA is better, and live verification at tender is the actual standard, because the failure mode is staleness: coverage that lapsed after the certificate was issued, which is precisely the scenario in which authority gets revoked for failure to maintain financial responsibility. A carrier in the window between insurance cancellation and authority revocation looks active and is functionally uninsured, and that window is where a measurable share of catastrophic uncovered losses live.

Lapse and reinstatement history is the pattern read. A carrier whose coverage has lapsed and reinstated three times in eighteen months is a carrier its own insurer keeps trying to shed, or a carrier that pays its premium only when the revocation notice arrives. Either way the market has priced this risk already and is telling you the answer, and insurer churn, a new carrier of record every renewal, says the same thing over a longer window. Insurance markets have better information about a carrier than you do. Watch what they do, not what the certificate says.

Who the insurer is matters as much as whether one exists. A policy from a thinly capitalized or unrated insurer, or from certain risk retention groups, is a recovery risk sitting behind a compliant filing. RRGs are a legitimate structure with a specific weakness: they’re capitalized by their member insureds, regulated by a single domicile state, and not backed by state guaranty funds, so when one fails, and several serving trucking have, its insureds are instantly uninsured, and its open claims are instantly unfunded. A carrier at a minimum limit, placed with a weak market, is telling you it bought the cheapest paper that satisfies the filing requirement, which is a statement about how it buys everything else too.

Structure and adequacy are the reads nobody does. A scheduled-auto policy covers the specific trucks listed on it, and a scheduled-driver endorsement covers the listed drivers, which means the substitute truck or the new hire on your load may be outside the coverage entirely, and you find out at the claim. Limit adequacy is the blunter problem: the federal minimum for general freight is $750,000, and the market convention is $1,000,000, both numbers set decades ago, and a single fatality routinely exceeds them severalfold. A million-dollar policy behind a carrier running dense urban corridors or high-verdict venues isn’t coverage against the loss that’s actually possible. It’s a deductible the plaintiff burns through on the way to the balance sheets behind it, and after Montgomery, one of those balance sheets is the party that made the selection.

17. The corporate tells

Exposure doesn’t respect the corporate boundary. Vetting tools do, and the gap between those two sentences is where sophisticated operators live.

The single-entity check is the design flaw. Every mainstream vetting product evaluates the DOT number in front of it, and the operators who matter run portfolios: multiple authorities under common control, formed at different times, with different listed officers, sharing equipment, drivers, addresses, and money. The portfolio exists because it works. It spreads history across entities so no single one accumulates enough to flag; it provides a fresh face when one burns, and it makes the do-not-use list a game of whack-a-mole, since flagging the entity does nothing about the operator.

Reading the network takes three public record types the freight industry mostly ignores. State corporate registries give you formation dates, registered agents, and officer names across entities, and the pattern of a person or an address appearing across multiple carrier registrations is the map. UCC financing statements are better than corporate filings because a lender filed them with money at stake: they name debtors and co-debtors, and a financing statement that lists the carrier, its principal personally, and two other trucking entities as co-debtors has just drawn the common-control diagram for you, sworn and dated. Litigation records complete it, because plaintiffs’ lawyers pierce these structures for a living and the complaints they file name the related entities and the principals in the first ten pages.

What you’re looking for in the network is traveling adverse history. A principal whose prior carrier was revoked, whose sibling entity carries a fraud judgment, whose related company sits on your own do-not-use list under a different DOT number. The entity in front of you can be six months old and spotless while the operator behind it has fifteen years of exactly the history you screen for, and the clean entity is the costume. This is the same logic as the chameleon check in section 14 run in the other direction: there you start from a suspicious carrier and look for the network; here you start from a clean one and check whether a network is what’s hiding behind it.

The boundary cuts both ways, which is worth saying because it keeps the check honest. Common ownership of multiple authorities isn’t itself adverse. Plenty of legitimate operators run separate entities for separate divisions, and a family with three trucking companies is often just a family with three trucking companies. The signal is adverse history plus the network, not the network alone, and a screening process that flags every multi-entity operator will bury the real finding under noise while disqualifying good capacity.

18. The carrier that looks fine and isn’t

The most dangerous profile in the data isn’t the ugly one. Ugly profiles get declined by everybody, including the tools this guide spends its time criticizing. The dangerous profile is clean, and it’s clean for a reason that has nothing to do with safety.

Thin data is the biggest category and the least understood. A carrier with two inspections has no record, not a good record, and the distinction is everything. Roughly speaking, the majority of active authorities are small enough and new enough that the public record can’t support a statistical conclusion about them in either direction, which means the majority of the market sits in a zone where a compliance-only screen returns nothing adverse as a matter of arithmetic. Nothing adverse reads as approval to a dispatcher under load pressure, and the system has just converted ignorance into confidence. The correct treatment is the opposite: thin data is a risk condition, scored as elevated until the record fills in, with the burden on verification and controls rather than on the absent history.

The new authority is thin data with a schedule attached. Carriers in their first eighteen months crash at materially higher rates than established ones, which is why authority age is among the strongest single predictors available, and the first eighteen months is precisely the period when the record is empty. The new entrant is simultaneously the least-known and highest-risk cohort on the board, and the market prices it backward, because new authorities buy freight with rate and the screen shows nothing adverse. None of this means new carriers are unusable. Every carrier was new once. It means the new one gets controls, defined freight, verification at pickup, and a file that documents you treated the unknown as unknown.

The stale rating is the clean look with a federal imprimatur. A satisfactory rating from a compliance review conducted a decade ago describes a company that may share nothing with the one in front of you but the DOT number: different owner, different fleet, different drivers, different everything. Ratings don’t expire, and most carriers are never reviewed twice, so the rating field on a profile is often the oldest fact on it, wearing the most authority. Read the date before you read the word.

The silent carrier is the subtle one. A fleet with the size and the tendered volume to generate steady inspections, showing almost none, isn’t lucky. Inspection exposure scales with miles, and a carrier moving real freight through weigh station states accumulates roadside contact as a matter of physics. Sustained silence from an active fleet means the exposure isn’t what’s claimed, the operation isn’t where it’s claimed, or the equipment isn’t crossing scales for a reason. A long quiet stretch from a carrier that’s supposedly running hard is a question, and the profile can’t answer it, which is the point. The clean profile ends the inquiry for a compliance check. For a risk check, it’s where the inquiry starts.

Parts V through VII follow: the vetting protocol step by step, scaling scrutiny to the load, defensibility, the deposition, and where the market goes from here.

Sen. Ashley Moody introduced the Staged Accident Fraud Prevention Act on July 22. It is four pages long. The bill adds a new Section 80505 to Chapter 805 of Title 49, United States Code. Anybody operating a motor vehicle who intentionally causes a collision with a commercial motor vehicle can be fined, imprisoned for up to 20 years, or both. If that collision produces serious bodily injury or death, the floor is 20 years, and the text sets no ceiling. Anybody who arranges for another person to cause one of those collisions faces the same penalties as the person behind the wheel. That last part is the whole point. It reaches the people who never leave the office.

There is a companion in the House. Reps. Mike Collins of Georgia and Brandon Gill of Texas introduced H.R. 2662 back on April 7, 2025. It has been sitting there since. The trade associations lined up behind the Senate version the day it dropped. ATA, OOIDA, TCA, NTTC, TRALA, NMFTA, ABA, TIA, IWLA, IFDA, NAMIC, APCIA, the Chamber’s Institute for Legal Reform, and the state associations in Florida, Georgia, and Texas. When OOIDA and ATA agree on something, you can usually assume the underlying problem is not in dispute.

Subsection (d) of the new section says a person cannot be prosecuted federally under it if that person has already been convicted or acquitted on the merits for the same act under state law. That is a real concession. Under the dual sovereignty doctrine, the federal government normally retains the right to prosecute the same conduct after a state does. Moody’s bill gives that up. Whether that is good policy or a drafting artifact is worth asking. It means a friendly state prosecution could function as a shield.

Why now

On March 20, a federal jury in New Orleans convicted two personal injury attorneys and their law firms of running one of these schemes for more than a decade.

The probe is called Operation Sideswipe. Sixty-three defendants have been charged. More than 50 have pleaded guilty or been convicted. The scheme ran from December 2011 through December 2024, which means it survived a global pandemic, a change in presidential administrations, an FBI investigation, and the public murder of a cooperating witness.

The machine

The people who drove the cars into the trucks were called slammers. They were paid roughly $1,000 per passenger for a collision involving a tractor-trailer, according to the second superseding indictment. The math there is not complicated. A slammer packs four people into a car and earns four thousand dollars for thirty seconds of work. The people who followed the slammers in a chase car and picked them up after impact were called spotters. The slammer would hit the truck, get out, and run. The spotter would collect him. The passengers stayed in the car and told police the driver had fled.

Recruiters brought fresh passengers into the operation. Runners referred crash victims to specific firms for money, which is illegal on its own. Some of the same people played more than one role. Damian Labeaud and Roderick Hickman worked as slammers, spotters, and runners.

Then the lawsuits got filed. Prosecutors said the attorneys encouraged passengers to undergo medically unnecessary neck and back surgeries to run up medical specials and inflate settlement value. Read that sentence again. People had their spines operated on to make a case worth more.

The attorneys and the slammers communicated through coded language. Fishing terms. Payments to slammers got disguised as loans, advances on future settlements, professional fees, or in one instance, compensation for construction work. When one slammer was told to expect questions about why he was being paid, he was instructed to lie about it.

By 2017, defense counsel on the insurance side started raising fraud as an affirmative defense. That is when the cover-up started. In November 2017, the indictment alleges, one firm manipulated Labeaud into stating on a secret recording that the crashes were legitimate. In October 2020, the same firm did it again with Hickman, who by then was a charged defendant represented by criminal counsel. They recorded him anyway, without his lawyer present. A document called a Verification of Facts got circulated for passengers to sign, and prosecutors said the firms knew those documents were false because they omitted the one fact that mattered.

Cornelius Garrison

In October 2019, a slammer named Cornelius Garrison started cooperating with the federal government. He was indicted on Sept. 18, 2020, and his indictment contained information he had provided during that cooperation.

Four days later, he was shot 10 times on his mother’s doorstep.

Ryan Harris, another slammer, was charged with the killing and pleaded guilty in exchange for a 35-year sentence and cooperation. In his proffer, he identified two other people. In April 2025, a superseding indictment charged Sean Alfortish and Leon “Chunky” Parker with conspiracy to commit witness tampering through murder, witness tampering through murder, conspiracy to retaliate against a witness through murder, retaliation against a witness through murder, and causing death through use of a firearm. Their trial is set for August. Killing a federal witness is a capital-eligible offense.

Prosecutors had already alleged that before the shooting, the group tried to buy Garrison off. The offer, according to reporting on the original indictment, was $500,000 to relocate to the Bahamas.

Everybody

Sean Alfortish is a former attorney. He is also a former magistrate judge. In 2011, he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit mail fraud, wire fraud, identity fraud, and health care fraud for rigging the 2008 election of the Louisiana Horsemen’s Benevolent and Protective Association, where he was president. He fraudulently marked ballots, used members’ Social Security numbers, and sent staff to four states to mail them. He was sentenced to 46 months and served 28. He was disbarred. An audit found hundreds of thousands of dollars of association money spent on personal items and Caribbean vacations.

He got out. He sued the Louisiana State Racing Commission and got relicensed. He got a seat on the New Mexico Horsemen’s Association board. He started training racehorses in 2022 and won 23 races. He ran for the LHBPA board again in 2020 and lost.

According to the government, he ran staged crashes the whole time while telling people he was still a practicing attorney.

Vanessa Motta was a Hollywood stuntwoman before she became a lawyer. Her firm’s advertising leaned on it. She and Alfortish were engaged. Jason Giles was a partner at The King Firm. Danny Patrick Keating, another New Orleans personal injury attorney, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and admitted paying Labeaud to stage 31 crashes. Keating told investigators he represented 77 plaintiffs in the resulting lawsuits.

The indictment also references attorneys identified only as C, D, E and F. Four more lawyers who litigated cases alongside the charged firms have not been publicly named.

Motta, Giles and both firms were convicted on all counts March 20 after a three-week trial before Chief U.S. District Judge Wendy Vitter. Both were remanded immediately. Both have moved for a new trial. Sentencing was scheduled for July 7 and July 14 and has been pushed. Legal analysts in New Orleans have put the exposure somewhere between seven and 20 years.

The FBI’s New Orleans field office said the investigation ran seven years and produced cases against more than 50 people. Trial testimony indicated the crashes named in the indictments are a fraction of the real number. Harris alone testified to staging more than 80.

This is not new, and it is not only Louisiana

Staged crash fraud has a taxonomy that predates most of the people reading this. The swoop and squat, where one car cuts off a second car so the second car brake-checks the victim into a rear-end collision. The drive-down, where somebody waves you into traffic and then hits you and denies waving. The panic stop, where a car packed with passengers slams the brakes in front of you. The T-bone with planted witnesses at an intersection.

Florida ran the last big federal sweep. Operation Sledgehammer, 2011 through 2013, out of the Southern District of Florida. Ninety-two defendants across six phases. Fifty-six charged federally, 36 by the Palm Beach County State Attorney. Twenty-one chiropractic clinics involved. More than $5 million in court-ordered restitution. Doctors, clinic owners, licensed professionals. Four defendants fled to Cuba.

The Florida version fed on personal injury protection coverage under the state’s no-fault system. The Louisiana version fed on something else entirely, and that difference is why we are talking about a federal trucking bill instead of state PIP reform.

Why trucks

The policy limits are bigger. A private passenger auto policy in most states carries a bodily injury limit measured in tens of thousands. A federally authorized motor carrier hauling general freight in a vehicle over 10,001 pounds carries a minimum of $750,000 in public liability. Most real carriers run $1 million primary with excess layers on top of that. Brokers and shippers frequently require it contractually.

So if you are in the business of manufacturing injury claims, a car full of passengers hitting a Honda Civic gets you a fight over $25,000 in coverage. The same car hitting an 18-wheeler gets you access to a seven-figure tower, a defendant with a national brand and a reputation to protect, and an insurer with a claims department that would rather settle a soft-tissue case for policy-limits-adjacent money than try it in Orleans Parish.

The prosecutors said the crashes clustered in New Orleans East and Gentilly, frequently near one particular truck stop. That is not a coincidence; it’s a hunting ground.

What it costs the rest of us

The Coalition Against Insurance Fraud put total U.S. insurance fraud at $308.6 billion a year in its 2022 study, the first update to a figure that had been stuck at $80 billion since 1995. The FBI estimates non-health insurance fraud adds $400 to $700 a year to the average household’s premiums. Industry estimates commonly put staged crash losses specifically around $20 billion annually.

Louisiana is the case study for what happens when it goes unchecked in one market.

Research cited by the Council for a Better Louisiana found that 49% of accidents in the state produce a bodily injury claim, against 26% nationally. Insurance Commissioner Tim Temple has said the state averaged roughly 64,000 bodily injury claims a year over the past decade, totaling $10.26 billion in bodily injury losses. Full coverage auto in Louisiana has run above $4,000 a year, at or near the most expensive in the country and roughly 50% above the national average.

The state passed a tort reform package in 2025. Comparative fault at 51% now bars recovery. No-pay, no-play thresholds went from $15,000 to $100,000. Damages are limited to medical costs actually paid rather than billed. More than 40 insurers have filed rate decreases since. Statewide auto rates are down about 6%.

Six percent. After all of that.

On the commercial side, the American Transportation Research Institute recorded insurance at $0.102 per mile, the highest ever measured. For a truck running 120,000 miles a year, that is $12,240 per unit before anyone files a claim. Marathon Strategies counted 135 nuclear verdicts against corporations in 2024, up 52% over 2023, totaling $31.3 billion, with a median award of $51 million. Commercial auto liability has been unprofitable as a line for 14 consecutive years.

Every one of those numbers gets paid by somebody. It gets paid by the owner-operator whose renewal came back 18% higher for no reason he can identify. It gets paid at the grocery store. It gets paid by the family in Metairie writing a $340 check every month for coverage on a paid-off sedan.

Cars cause most car-truck crashes. The University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute reviewed 8,309 fatal car-truck collisions and assigned fault to the car driver 81% of the time, compared with 27% for the truck driver. An earlier Blower analysis of more than 5,400 fatal crashes found the car driver solely responsible in 70% of them against 16% for the truck driver. FMCSA’s own Large Truck Crash Causation Study put it at 56% passenger vehicle and 44% truck in two-vehicle crashes. The AAA Foundation found 80% of passenger vehicle drivers in those crashes had at least one unsafe driving act identified, against 27% of truck drivers.

The people in the car are the ones who die. Roughly 70% of the fatalities in large truck crashes are occupants of the other vehicle. Both things are true. The car is usually the cause, and the car is usually the casualty. A staged crash weaponizes exactly that asymmetry.

Trucking has its own insurance fraud problem, and it does not run through a personal injury firm. It runs through the front door of the registration and financial responsibility system. Carriers self-attest a fleet size to get an instantly issued policy, file the BMC-91, activate authority, and then run a great deal more equipment than they declared. I have looked at one-truck filings with hundreds of distinct VINs behind them and inspection counts in the four figures. Median policy life in one cluster I pulled was 92 days. When the crash comes, the driver and the tractor are not on the schedule; the insurer pays anyway because of the MCS-90 endorsement, and then subrogates against a shell that has nothing. Then the same people file a new authority.

Staged crash fraud and carrier fraud are the same disease presenting in two organs. Neither one gets caught, because nobody verifies anything at the point of entry.

So does the bill matter

Some. Not as much as we’d like. Sixty-three people got charged in Louisiana without this statute. Prosecutors used mail fraud, wire fraud, conspiracy under 18 U.S.C. 1349, obstruction, witness tampering and, ultimately, murder charges. Those tools work. What they require is a mailing or a wire, which is easy in an insurance case, and a lot of investigative runway.

What Section 80505 would add is a direct substantive offense that does not require a predicate mailing. It also explicitly reaches arrangers, which puts a lawyer, doctor, or recruiter squarely inside the elements rather than requiring the government to build a conspiracy. That’s nothing.

What the bill does not do is fund anything. There is no task force, no FMCSA data mandate, no requirement that insurers report suspected staged claims into a shared repository, no hook into crash data. Collins wrote Attorney General Bondi in 2025 asking for a dedicated staged accident task force. That has not materialized publicly.

Deterrence only deters people who expect to get caught. Operation Sideswipe took seven years, an FBI field office, a state police detail, the Metropolitan Crime Commission, a U.S. Attorney’s office, and a murdered witness to produce 63 defendants out of a scheme whose participants testified the real number of crashes was much higher.

A federally required motor carrier liability policy does not insure trucks. It insures a company. I know that sounds like a semantic distinction. It isn’t. It’s the load-bearing wall of the entire financial responsibility system, and a growing number of operators have figured out how to stand on it. Insurers haven’t helped themselves with the growing number of instant issue, self-attested programs.

The MCS-90

When a motor carrier gets operating authority, it has to prove financial responsibility. The insurer files a Form BMC-91 or 91X with FMCSA and attaches an endorsement called the MCS-90 to the underlying policy. That endorsement exists under 49 CFR 387.15, and it was written to make sure a member of the public who gets hurt by a truck is not left holding an empty bag because of a coverage fight between the carrier and its insurer.

The insurer agrees to pay any final judgment against the insured for public liability arising from the negligent operation, maintenance, or use of motor vehicles, up to the federal minimum, and no condition, provision, stipulation or limitation in the policy relieves the insurer of that obligation. No condition. No limitation.

The courts have applied that language to exactly the situations you would expect. The truck was not scheduled on the declarations page. The trailer was leased or borrowed. The driver was not listed. The driver was excluded. The carrier blew off its duty to cooperate in its own defense. In every one of those scenarios, the endorsement can force payment anyway.

Then, and only then, the insurer gets a right of reimbursement against its own insured for anything it paid solely because of the endorsement. That principle is settled going back to Harco National Insurance Co. v. Bobac Trucking in the Ninth Circuit in 1997 and has been applied consistently since.

So the sequence is: injured party gets paid, insurer eats it, insurer chases the carrier. The MCS-90 is not insurance. It is a surety. It is the federal government standing behind the traveling public with the insurer’s checkbook.

For 40 years that worked fine, because the insurer had underwritten the risk before it signed. Somebody with actual industry knowledge looked at the loss runs, pulled the MVRs, asked about dispatch and maintenance and hours-of-service oversight, and made a judgment about whether to stand behind the operation. When I got my own authority, that process took weeks. It was invasive and irritating and completely appropriate.

That process is no longer overarching or consistent for a large and growing share of this market.

Instant issue

The model now is self-attestation. The carrier goes online. It declares a fleet size, a commodity, a radius of operation, and a driver roster. An algorithm prices it. The policy binds, sometimes in minutes. The BMC-91 gets filed. Authority activates. Nobody pulls the SAFER record. Nobody looks at BASIC percentiles. Nobody asks whether the officers behind this LLC ran a different LLC that lost its authority 90 days ago. And critically, nobody verifies whether the three trucks on the application are the only three trucks that will operate under this DOT number.

The instant issue model is not illegal. It is not even unusual in consumer lines, where personal auto has been algorithmically underwritten for years. The difference is the asset and the harm. A personal auto policy written without a claims history check produces, worst case, a coverage dispute between an individual and an insurer. An 80,000-pound truck operating under an instantly issued policy, run by principals who previously held a revoked authority, with a fleet several multiples larger than what was declared, produces something else. It produces a funeral.

What the data looks like

We pulled a cluster of 32 carriers connected through shared VINs on roadside inspection records. Shared VINs are a useful triangulation because a broker with no trucks generates no inspections and therefore self-excludes from the sample. If you show up in a VIN crossover, you were physically operating equipment.

Two insurance groups underwrote that entire cluster. Progressive entities wrote 59% of the most recent policies. GEICO entities wrote 28%. Combined, 88%. These are not offshore risk retention groups or fly-by-night MGAs. These are two of the largest auto insurers in the country, and their instant-issue commercial programs were binding one-truck-on-paper carriers.

Every one of those carriers filed at either $750,000 or $1 million in coverage. That is the heavy-truck floor, and behind those one-truck and three-truck declarations sat hundreds of distinct VINs, inspection counts running into the four figures, and operations spanning more than 40 states.

The policy-duration figures I originally reported for this cluster came from the defective source described below and are being recomputed. They are removed here rather than restated.

That’s the engine. Bind a minimum-limit policy on a self-declared micro-fleet, run a real fleet across the country, let the policy lapse, rebind somewhere else, repeat.

The insurer at first binding

I ran a population of 108,400 carriers that made a first bodily injury and property damage filing between 2015 and 2024, with a minimum two-year follow-up window. Restricting that to carriers declaring one to five power units, with no prior revocation, leaves 40,073. Those are clean first-time carriers, and what I measured is involuntary shutdown inside the first year of coverage. Market baseline was 17.4%.

Sorted by insurance group, clean first-time carriers failed inside year one at these rates: Everspan, an Ambac company, 33.0% on 464 carriers. The Berkshire Hathaway group, 29.9% on 2,167. Integon, which is National General under Allstate, 28.3% on 311. Hallmark, 28.0% on 328. Progressive group, 18.1% on 19,451. Other risk retention groups, 16.3% on 1,643. Everybody else, 14.3% on 14,164. AmTrust group, 10.2% on 1,545.

That is roughly three to one between the top and the bottom, on carriers with identical adverse history, which is to say none.

Sample size matters at the extremes here. Everspan, Integon and Hallmark each sit on a few hundred carriers, where Progressive sits on nearly twenty thousand. The two numbers I would put weight on are Berkshire at 29.9% on 2,167 carriers and AmTrust at 10.2% on 1,545, because both books are large enough to mean something and they sit at opposite ends of the same market. Same size class, same decade, same kind of customer, three times the failure rate.

The gap does not close over time. Stratified by entry year from 2015 through 2024, Berkshire’s clean carriers failed at a higher rate than Progressive’s in every single one of those ten years, with the spread running between 7 and 17 points. There is no year in which the two converge. Berkshire’s annual cohort in this population runs between 114 and 317 carriers, so individual years bounce, but the direction never does.

I originally reported that median policy duration tracked the failure ordering, and that short policies and dead carriers were the same phenomenon seen from two angles. That was an artifact and I am withdrawing it. Insurers differ sharply in how many amendment filings they generate per policy: Integon averages 7.30 segments, Everspan 2.16, Berkshire 2.08, Progressive 1.46. Because my source table kept one segment per insurer, the companies that file the most amendments had their policies cut the shortest, and the reported durations tracked filing behavior almost perfectly in reverse. Rebuilt from complete records, median first-year policy duration is 364 days at Berkshire, 365 at Everspan, 365 at Hallmark, 366 at AmTrust, 417 at Progressive and 482 at Integon. The differences are flat. Integon, which I described as writing the shortest paper in the market, in fact writes the longest while still posting one of the higher failure rates. The relationship runs backward from what I published.

What does hold on clean data is the cycling. In their first year of coverage, carriers at the highest-failure groups run through more insurers: 1.31 at Everspan and 1.30 at Berkshire, against 1.15 at Progressive and 1.07 at AmTrust. Smaller number than a policy-length gap. Real, though.

One writer had zero presence in this segment before 2022. Its first two cohorts failed at 34.7% on 176 carriers and 37.6% on 189, against market rates of 18.7% and 19.2% for those years. Roughly double the market on arrival. Its 2024 cohort came in at 21.2% on 99 carriers against a market of 21.4%, which is to say indistinguishable. That cohort is small enough that the drop may be noise.

Two specific ambiguities matter. Wesco Insurance Company is AmTrust. Wesco Financial is Berkshire. And the GUARD entity assignment to Berkshire is unverified. If either of those is wrong, the Berkshire figures move. I am publishing the finding with the gate visible rather than pretending it isn’t there.

A third gate, and a self-inflicted one. The first version of this piece drew its insurance figures from a processed table inside my own platform rather than from the raw federal file. That table was deduplicating coverage records in a way I did not know about. FMCSA writes coverage in segments, so one annual policy can appear as three or four rows under a single policy number, and my table kept one row per insurer and dropped the rest. It held 2.65 million liability records against 5.96 million in the raw file. About half the filing history was missing. Policies looked shorter than they were and first coverage dates looked later than they were, which is how half my original cohort turned out not to be new entrants at all.

Two warning signs went past me. Policies that appeared to bind and cancel on the same day, which are ordinary replacement filings. And a carrier whose entire filing history fell on one calendar date, which was just its renewal anniversary. I explained both away as data quirks. Both were symptoms. I found the defect when a coverage record on my own carrier profile page contradicted my own analysis.

The numbers above are rebuilt from FMCSA’s raw licensing and insurance file, 844,370 reassembled policies across 227,444 carriers. I will hand the methodology to anyone who asks for it.

FMCSA does not regulate insurance underwriting, and I am not asking it to. Market conduct belongs to state insurance departments. What this finding is good for is that the identity of the insurer at first binding is a usable risk-screening variable that exists at the moment of registration, before the carrier has any operating history at all. It is available on day one. Nobody uses it.

What it looks like at the crash

Three patterns from recon, compliance, and expert witness cases I have worked. I am keeping these anonymized because litigation is active or recently closed.

In one, a driver operating on a foreign commercial license, a Russian CDL actually, dispatched by a chameleon carrier whose principal place of business was a unit in a beachfront condo tower used as a short-term rental (AKA Airbnb) hauling a load that had been brokered four times from one of the oldest machinery manufacturers in the United States, killed a father of three. That driver had been running at night using flashlights as makeshift brake lighting. Five European transportation intermediaries touched that load before it reached the truck. Nobody in that chain verified anything about the carrier that finally hauled it.

In another, the financial responsibility filing on record matched a carrier that was not the carrier lettered on the truck. The trailer belonged to a third carrier operating on its own separate instant-issue policy. The plates on the tractor and the trailer came off other vehicles entirely.

In a third, the defendant carrier produced no driver qualification file, no hours-of-service records, no drug and alcohol testing documentation, no MVR, no Clearinghouse query, no maintenance records, no DVIRs, no annual inspection, no telematics, and no post-accident testing. Not incomplete. Nonexistent. Within months of the crash, the tractor and trailer had migrated through two additional carrier identities, the last of which was a Wyoming entity organized anonymously.

In every one of those cases, the insurer’s position was reasonable on its face. The carrier did not add the driver. The carrier did not schedule the asset. Under the four corners of the policy, that is a denial. Under the MCS-90, it is a payment.

The collection problem

So the insurer pays the injured family up to the federal minimum. Then it exercises its reimbursement right and goes after its insured. Its insured is a single-member LLC with a leased tractor, a registered agent at a Wyoming mail drop, a business bank account with four figures in it, and officers whose names appear on six other DOT numbers. There is nothing to collect. The subrogation file gets closed at zero.

I looked at this from the address side too. There are 5,565 active carriers listing a principal place of business at one of 333 street addresses that each host at least eight carriers and six or more distinct officer names. Tighten the threshold to 25 carriers and 20 officers, and you still get 2,098 carriers across 35 addresses. One address in Signal Hill, California, is the declared principal place of business for 507 active carriers with 423 distinct officers, three-quarters of which share a single email domain. An address on North Gould Street in Sheridan, Wyoming, hosts 120.

Most of those addresses belong to legitimate compliance services, registered agents, and virtual office providers. Nobody there is alleged to be doing anything unlawful, but the regulatory problem is unavoidable. New entrant safety audits are conducted at the place of business. Post-crash record requests go there. Field office jurisdiction and state MCSAP assignment both flow from it. When that field does not describe a real place where a real person makes safety decisions, the entire downstream enforcement structure is aimed at a mailbox.

When the shell dies, it reincarnates. New LLC, new DOT number, family member listed as owner, same equipment, same dispatch, same phone. GAO reported in 2012 that applicants with chameleon attributes were three times more likely than other new applicants to be involved in a severe crash, 18% against 6%. FMCSA has the authority to act under 49 CFR 386.73 and runs a screening process called ARCHI. The agency is replacing its 40-year-old registration infrastructure with MOTUS through 2026, with business verification and identity checks at registration. That will help at the margins. It will stop casual impersonation and account takeover. It will not, by itself, reconcile a declared fleet of one against 600 VINs on the road.

What would actually change this

Four things, and none of them require new legislation.

Verify the fleet count at binding instead of accepting attestation. The inspection data that would expose a one-truck filing running 600 VINs is public and free. Any insurer can pull it. Any broker can pull it. I pull it.

Reconcile the financial responsibility filing against observed operations on an ongoing basis, not at inception. A carrier declaring one power unit that generates 1,100 inspections in a year across 40 states is not an underwriting mystery. It is an alarm that nobody has wired to a bell.

Treat rapid rebinding as an underwriting event. A carrier that changes insurers repeatedly inside its first year is telling you something, and that history sits in the L&I filing record, visible to every insurer that looks.

Somebody needs to have a conversation about the $750,000 minimum, which has not moved since the mid-1980s. The median nuclear verdict is now $51 million. A minimum-limits policy is not protection for the public, and it is not protection for the carrier. It is a rounding error that happens to satisfy a regulation.

The instant-issue model did not create bad carriers. It removed the last checkpoint that used to catch them. Underwriting was never a formality. It was the only place in this system where a human being with domain knowledge looked at an operation and decided whether the public should be exposed to it.

We automated that away and called it efficiency. The bill for it is being paid at the scene of crashes, and then socialized into the premium of every honest carrier in the country. The Tea is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Ingrid Brown and Black Jack’s truck is the poster child here because one of the best indicators of carrier fitness is their drivers and how well the carrier takes care of their equipment. Ingrid drives the truck, and no matter how much she drives, she and “Lucy” here are always professional and always look and act the part. Professionalism is a huge first indicator.

Part I. How We Got Here

1. The bargain of 1994 and the shield it built

Trucking was deregulated economically in 1980. The Motor Carrier Act of that year dismantled the Interstate Commerce Commission’s authority over interstate rates and entry, and the number of carriers holding federal authority went from around eighteen thousand to well over forty thousand within a decade. What the 1980 Act didn’t touch was intrastate regulation. States kept their own commissions, their own tariff filings, their own entry restrictions, and by the early 1990s something like forty states still regulated intrastate trucking rates and routes. A parcel company running a truck from Sacramento to Fresno was operating under a rate structure a state agency had approved. The same truck crossing into Nevada wasn’t.

That patchwork is what Congress went after in 1994, and it went after it in a strange vehicle. The preemption language rode into law on the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act, which is why a statute that governs freight brokers has the word aviation in its name and why half the industry has never bothered to learn what the acronym stands for. The operative language, now codified at 49 U.S.C. 14501(c)(1), says a state may not enact or enforce a law, regulation, or other provision having the force of law “related to a price, route, or service of any motor carrier, or any motor private carrier, broker, or freight forwarder with respect to the transportation of property.”

Three things about that sentence have driven thirty years of litigation.

The phrase “related to” was deliberately borrowed from the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978, which had itself borrowed it from ERISA. By 1994 the Supreme Court had already read that phrase broadly in the airline context in Morales v. Trans World Airlines, 504 U.S. 374 (1992), holding that state consumer protection enforcement against airline fare advertising was preempted because it had a connection with or reference to fares. Congress used the same words in the trucking statute knowing what the Court had done with them. The breadth was the point.

The word “broker” is right there in the list. That wasn’t an accident either. Congress was preempting state economic regulation of the whole freight arranging chain, not just the carriers. The drafters, though, were thinking about tariff filing requirements and entry permits, not about a jury in Illinois deciding whether a company should have pulled a safety rating before tendering a load.

The statute also contains its own limit. Section 14501(c)(2)(A) says the preemption provision “shall not restrict the safety regulatory authority of a State with respect to motor vehicles.” States lost the ability to set rates. They kept the ability to regulate safety. Everything that followed turned on how far that second sentence reaches.

The tort shield was built out of the gap. Somebody gets hurt. The family sues the carrier, which is insured for a million dollars and has four trucks, and then sues the broker, which is insured for considerably more and has a balance sheet. The claim against the broker is negligent hiring: you selected this carrier, you had access to its record, and its record said this was coming. The broker answers that selecting a carrier is a broker service, that a state negligence claim about carrier selection is therefore a law related to a broker service, and that 14501(c)(1) preempts it. The plaintiff answers that the safety exception saves the claim. The court decides that question on the pleadings, before discovery, before anybody’s file gets produced and before anybody sits for a deposition.

Courts split, and they split on a narrow point. Everyone agreed common law duties count as state law for preemption purposes. Everyone agreed a negligence claim about carrier selection is at least arguably related to a broker’s services. The fight was over the four words “with respect to motor vehicles” in the safety exception. Brokers argued the phrase limits the exception to state authority aimed at motor vehicles themselves, and a broker doesn’t own, drive, maintain, or put a driver in a truck. Plaintiffs argued that choosing which truck goes on the road is about as motor-vehicle-concerning as a decision gets.

The Ninth Circuit went with the plaintiffs in Miller v. C.H. Robinson Worldwide in 2020. The Eleventh Circuit went the other way in Aspen American Insurance v. Landstar. The Seventh Circuit went with the brokers in Ye v. GlobalTranz Enterprises, 74 F.4th 453 (2023), reasoning that the exception requires a direct link between the state law and motor vehicles, and that a claim against a broker is a step removed. For the next three years, whether a grieving family got to depose a broker depended on which side of a circuit line the crash happened on. The Supreme Court declined to take the question several times before it took Montgomery.

What matters about this history for anyone selecting carriers today isn’t the doctrine. It’s that the shield was never a judgment about whether carrier selection matters. It was a judgment about a preposition. The entire industry built its selection practices around a procedural defense that had nothing to do with safety, and many companies convinced themselves the defense was a verdict on the merits. It wasn’t, and when it went away there was nothing underneath it.

2. What Montgomery actually says

Caribe Transport II held a conditional safety rating when C.H. Robinson tendered it a load of plastic pots. Conditional isn’t a secret, and it isn’t hard to find. It sits on a public federal website next to the record that produced it, and in Montgomery’s telling that record included deficiencies in driver qualification, hours of service, vehicle maintenance, and crash rates. The driver, Yosniel Varela-Mojena, had been cited for careless driving before that day. On December 7, 2017, Shawn Montgomery was stopped on the shoulder of Interstate 70 in Illinois with a mechanical problem when Varela-Mojena’s tractor-trailer left the road and rear-ended him. Montgomery lost his leg.

He sued the driver, the carrier, and the broker. The claim against C.H. Robinson was negligent hiring: that a company arranging freight knew or should have known that putting this carrier under this load was reasonably likely to hurt somebody. The district court in the Southern District of Illinois never reached that question. Applying Ye, it held that the FAAAA expressly preempted the claim and entered judgment on the pleadings for the broker in January 2024. The Seventh Circuit affirmed at 124 F.4th 1053 (2025). That was the ordinary outcome. For most of a decade, in a large part of the country, a broker facing a negligent hiring claim filed a motion, cited preemption, and went home before anyone took a deposition.

The Supreme Court granted certiorari at 606 U.S. 1066 (2025) and decided the case on May 14, 2026. The vote was nine to zero. Justice Barrett wrote the opinion and it runs eight pages. The reasoning fits in a sentence: requiring a broker to use ordinary care when selecting a carrier concerns motor vehicles, most obviously the trucks that will haul the goods, so the claim falls inside the safety exception and survives preemption.

The Court took the counterarguments seriously and rejected all of them. C.H. Robinson argued, with the United States joining in part, that reading the exception this way would let it swallow the preemption provision whole, since nearly any claim can be framed as a safety claim. It argued the reading creates surplusage, and it argued the reading produces an anomaly, because a separate subsection of the same statute, 14501(b)(1), preempts state regulation of intrastate broker services with no safety exception at all, meaning brokers would end up more completely protected on intrastate freight than on interstate. The Court granted that the anomaly is real and said it could not explain why Congress would have done that. It concluded it would be odder still to hold that the negligent hiring of an unsafe carrier whose truck injured someone isn’t an exercise of a state’s authority to regulate safety.

That’s the holding. Now read the parts the industry coverage skipped, because they are where the next three years of litigation live.

The Court decided nothing about purely intrastate loads. The intrastate provision at 14501(b)(1) has no safety exception, and the Court expressly declined to say whether a negligent hiring claim on an intrastate move is preempted. For a brokerage running regional freight inside a single state, that’s a live defense that has to be pleaded and preserved rather than assumed away. Every summary saying the ruling “applies in all fifty states” describes the interstate holding and quietly drops this. It’s one of the few doors left open, and it will get tested.

The Court decided nothing about vicarious liability. Negligent hiring says you chose badly. Vicarious liability says the carrier was functioning as your agent, so its conduct is your conduct, which reaches past the selection decision into how the freight actually moved. It was never preempted, it wasn’t before the Court, and Montgomery left it exactly where it was. For a broker exercising real control over routing, scheduling, equipment, or dispatch, the agency theory is frequently the larger exposure, and it’s the one that scales with how modern digital freight matching actually works.

The concurrence is being quoted with the front half removed. Justice Kavanaugh concurred, joined by Justice Alito, and the concurrence says the case was closer than the majority opinion made it appear before agreeing with the result. The line the trade press ran with is the policy point: if brokers can be held liable for disregarding poor safety records, they have a strong incentive to do business only with safe and reliable motor carriers. That sentence will appear in plaintiff briefs for a generation. The sentence in front of it belongs to the defense, and dropping it’s how you get surprised in a hearing.

3. What Montgomery didn’t do, and why that’s the harder problem

There’s no threshold in the opinion. No required data source, no minimum score, no form, no filing, no audit standard, and no safe harbor. The Court answered a jurisdictional question and left the substance to state common law negligence. That means the standard is ordinary care, and ordinary care is whatever a jury decides a reasonable company in your position would have done.

That isn’t a loophole, and it shouldn’t be read as one. A bright-line federal rule is something you can satisfy and then stop thinking about. Ordinary care judged after the fact has no ceiling. It gets defined at trial, by a lawyer holding the same free public records you could have pulled in ninety seconds, standing next to a family. The absence of a rule is worse for defendants than a strict rule would have been, because a strict rule is a floor you can prove you cleared and a hindsight standard is a moving target you argue about in front of people who have already seen the photographs.

The doctrinal hook in most states is older than the FAAAA. The Restatement (Second) of Torts section 411 says an employer of an independent contractor is liable for physical harm caused by the contractor’s failure to exercise reasonable care, if the employer failed to exercise reasonable care in selecting a contractor who is competent and careful. Most states have adopted some version of it. That’s the body of law that fills the space Montgomery opened, and it’s state by state. What counts as reasonable inquiry in Texas is not identical to what counts in Washington. Anyone telling you there’s now a national carrier vetting standard is selling something.

Three claims get confused constantly, and they are different animals.

Negligent selection, also called negligent hiring, is the direct claim that you chose a carrier you knew or should have known was unsafe. Your conduct is the wrong. Your file is the evidence. This is what Montgomery unlocked.

Negligent entrustment reaches the decision to put freight in the hands of a specific driver or a specific piece of equipment. It’s narrower and harder to prove against a broker, because a broker usually doesn’t know which driver or which tractor is coming. Usually. If your system captured the driver’s name and the unit number at dispatch, and that driver was in your data with a prior event, the argument gets much easier for the other side.

Vicarious liability doesn’t care whether you chose well. It asks whether the carrier was your agent, which turns on control: who set the route, who dictated the schedule, who specified the equipment, who could tell the driver what to do and expect to be obeyed. This is the theory that punishes companies for building sophisticated operational tooling, because every feature that gives you visibility and control over how the freight moves is a fact in the plaintiff’s column. It was never preempted. It has always been available. It is going to be the growth area.

You can be found not liable on all three and still spend two years and seven figures getting there, which is the part that actually changes behavior. The value of the preemption shield was never that it produced good outcomes at trial. It was that it ended cases before discovery. Discovery is the expense, discovery is where your emails live, and discovery is now the default.

4. Who this actually hits

The trade coverage framed Montgomery as a broker problem. That framing is wrong in a way that leaves the most exposed parties feeling safest.

Brokers and 3PLs are the obvious defendants, and they at least know it. The property broker holding FMCSA authority under 49 U.S.C. 13904 is the named defendant in the case and the party every article addressed.

Shippers who tender direct are selecting carriers as surely as any broker, and the duty of ordinary care in selecting a contractor doesn’t attach to a license number. It attaches to the act of choosing. A manufacturer with a private fleet and an overflow program that tenders directly to carriers is doing selection with, in my experience, less process than a mid-size brokerage. I have reviewed direct-tender programs at companies with revenue in the billions where the entire vetting record was a signed carrier packet and a certificate of insurance in a shared drive folder.

Shippers who hire brokers face a second-order version of the same claim: negligent selection of the broker. The question is whether you knew or should have known your broker didn’t vet carriers. If you ran a bid, awarded on price, and never asked how the routing guide gets filled, you have a problem that a broker indemnity clause doesn’t solve.

Freight forwarders are in the statute by name and take custody, which gives them both exposures at once.

Asset carriers brokering their own overflow are the most underappreciated group in this entire conversation. A carrier with a hundred trucks and a brokerage authority that covers surge volume is a motor carrier for half its revenue and a broker for the other half, and the brokered half now carries the same selection exposure as any 3PL. Most of them have a compliance department built entirely around the carrier side. Their brokerage side is three people and a load board.

Digital freight platforms have a specific problem. The product advantage is automation: instant tender, algorithmic matching, no human in the loop. Automation means the selection decision is a set of rules somebody wrote, which will be produced in discovery and read line by line. The question in the deposition isn’t what the dispatcher was thinking. It’s what the code did, why the threshold was set at that number, and who approved it. That’s a harder question than the human one, because a rule applies to every load and a human error applies to one.

Insurers, agents, and MGUs aren’t defendants, but they are repricing. Contingent auto liability and broker errors and omissions were written in a world where preemption killed most of these claims early. That assumption is gone, and the pricing is following. If you broker freight, your renewal is where you will feel Montgomery before you ever feel it in a courtroom.

5. The money, and why the plaintiff bar was ready for this

Trucking litigation isn’t general liability litigation. The physics decide the damages before anybody hires a lawyer. When a tractor-trailer at eighty thousand pounds meets a passenger car, the people who die are overwhelmingly in the smaller vehicle, and the survivors are catastrophically injured rather than moderately injured. These are wrongful death and lifetime-care cases, and the verdict distribution reflects it.

The nuclear verdict data everyone quotes comes from the U.S. Chamber Institute for Legal Reform, which logged roughly 1,300 verdicts over ten million dollars between 2013 and 2022, with a median award near twenty-one million and a mean near eighty-nine million. That spread between median and mean is the whole story. The distribution has a tail, the tail is where the trucking cases live, and 2023 alone produced more than twenty trucking verdicts over a hundred million dollars.

The theory that moves those numbers isn’t the crash. Crash facts establish liability and damages. The theory that moves the number past the policy limits and into the balance sheet is the argument that somebody made a choice, in advance, with information available to them, and chose revenue. Improper hiring and onboarding allegations correlate with some of the largest increases in total award of any negligence theory, because they convert an accident into a decision. A jury can forgive an accident. A jury has a much harder time forgiving a decision, especially when the decision is documented in an email that says the load had to go out.

The plaintiff bar has spent a decade building the infrastructure for this. There are firms, conferences, expert networks, and litigation funding aimed specifically at commercial motor vehicle cases, and the discovery playbook is standardized. They know what to ask for, what a carrier profile looks like on the day of the crash versus the day of the deposition, and that most defendants can’t produce a contemporaneous selection file. Before Montgomery, all of that work stopped at the courthouse door in a large part of the country. The infrastructure was built and waiting.

What the industry keeps saying to itself is that its exposure went up on May 14. That’s not what happened. The exposure was constant. Brokers and shippers were always capable of putting a dangerous carrier under a load, and the data to see it coming has been free and public the entire time. What changed on May 14 is that the question now gets asked out loud, in front of twelve people who have never heard of the FAAAA and won’t care that the carrier was technically allowed to operate.

Part II. What a Motor Carrier Actually Is

6. Three questions, one check

The industry collapses three separate questions into one lookup, and the collapse is the single most common failure I see when I am brought into a file after the fact.

A compliant carrier holds active operating authority, has the required financial responsibility filings on record, and is legally permitted to haul. That’s a status. You can confirm it in ninety seconds, and it tells you close to nothing about whether the carrier will hurt somebody. Authority and insurance are the price of admission. They are not evidence of anything except that a fee was paid and a form was filed.

A safe carrier is one whose record and conduct say it’s unlikely to hurt somebody. That’s a pattern, not a status. It lives in crash history, out-of-service rates, inspection results, violation severity and trend, driver behavior, and maintenance discipline. Part of it lives in public records. The most predictive part doesn’t, because it lives inside the carrier’s operation and only surfaces if the carrier shows it to you.

A defensible carrier is one you can prove you were reasonable to choose. That’s a record of your own diligence, and it’s the only one of the three that’s entirely within your control. It’s the file showing what you checked, when you checked it, what the data said that day, and why you proceeded.

These come apart in every direction. Caribe Transport II was compliant on the day of the tender. It held active authority, and it had insurance on file. It also held a conditional safety rating with alleged deficiencies across driver qualification, hours of service, maintenance, and crash rate, which is the entire compliant-but-not-safe case in a single carrier. Run it the other direction, and you get the carrier that’s genuinely well run, with a thin inspection record because it operates in a state that inspects lightly, and a broker who never looked. That carrier was safe. The selection was still indefensible, because in discovery the question isn’t only whether the carrier was dangerous. It’s whether you did anything at all to find out.

“They had active authority and insurance on file” is a true sentence. In front of a jury, it’s close to worthless, because it answers the compliance question while the plaintiff is asking the safety question, and everyone in the room can hear you answering the wrong one.

7. Anatomy of a carrier, and how each layer lies

A motor carrier is six layers stacked on top of each other. Each layer has its own public record, its own failure mode, and its own specific way an operator can make it look better than it’s. Most vetting tools read one layer, usually the first, and report the result as if it described the whole company.

The authority

A USDOT number is a census identifier. It means an entity registered with FMCSA and answered questions about itself. It isn’t a license, it doesn’t expire, and it doesn’t mean anybody checked anything. An MC number is an operating authority for interstate for-hire transportation, and it can be active, pending, revoked, or reinstated.

The failure modes here are staleness and misreading. Authority gets revoked, most commonly for failure to maintain the required financial responsibility filing, and the revocation doesn’t announce itself to anyone who onboarded the carrier eight months ago. There’s a window between the notice of revocation and the effective date where a carrier is still technically operating and is functionally uninsurable. Reinstatement after revocation resets nothing in most vetting tools, so a carrier that lost and regained authority twice in a year shows up as active with no history displayed.

The subtler failure is confusing the identifiers. A carrier can hold a DOT number with no active MC authority and still look legitimate in a screenshot, because the DOT number resolves and returns a company. If your process confirms “the DOT number is valid,” your process confirms nothing.

The entity behind the authority

Behind the authority is a corporation or an LLC, registered in some state, with a registered agent and an incorporation date. Behind that’s a BOC-3 process agent designation, which is the filing that tells the world who can accept legal service on the carrier’s behalf in each state.

This layer lies beneath the surface: it’s newer than it looks and one of many. A corporation formed two months ago holding authority that appears seasoned is a reincarnation tell, and it’s one of the highest-signal, lowest-cost checks available, because corporate formation dates are public in every state and almost nobody pulls them. Process agent designations cluster: a handful of agents serve enormous numbers of carriers legitimately, but rapid agent changes and unusual clustering track with problem networks in a way that’s visible if you look at the aggregate rather than the single filing.

The entity also lies by address. A commercial mail receiving agency or a registered agent suite that houses hundreds of authorities isn’t itself proof of anything. It’s a reason to look at what else is at that address and whether the other tenants have a pattern.

The people

Officers are reported to FMCSA and are recorded in state corporate filings, and people move. The principal who ran a carrier into revocation last year is running a new one this year, and the new one has no history because it’s new. That’s the whole mechanism of authority reincarnation, and it’s a people problem wearing a paperwork costume.

This layer lies by omission. Officer fields are self-reported and thinly validated. The person who actually controls the company is frequently not the person listed, and the listed officer is sometimes a relative, an employee, or a name that appears on a dozen filings. UCC financing statements are useful here for the same reason they are useful in any fraud workup: they name principals and related entities as debtors and co-debtors, and they are filed by lenders who did their own diligence and had money at stake.

The iron

Power units are reported on the MCS-150 and are captured, imperfectly, in the roadside inspection record by VIN and plate. A carrier’s fleet is some mix of owned tractors, leased tractors, and owner-operator equipment under lease, and the mix matters, because a carrier whose entire fleet is leased from its drivers has different control over maintenance than one that owns and shops its own trucks.

The iron lies through the paper attached to it. The same plate appearing on materially different VINs, or the same VIN appearing in two states on the same day at a distance no truck could cover, isn’t a data error often enough to ignore. Equipment also migrates between authorities: a fleet of VINs that were inspected under one DOT number last year and a different DOT number this year, with no sale recorded, is the physical evidence of a reincarnation that the paperwork was designed to hide. Trucks are harder to fake than filings, which is why the equipment record is the highest-value place to look when the corporate record is clean.

The drivers

Drivers are employees, 1099 contractors, or leased through a driver staffing company, and the distinction determines who holds the qualification file and who runs the drug and alcohol program. A carrier that leases drivers can have a perfectly compliant driver qualification process that it doesn’t perform, and can be genuinely unsure how many people drove for it last quarter.

This layer barely exists in public data, which is why the worst risk hides there. Roadside inspections capture the driver on that day. Nothing public tells you turnover rate, and turnover is one of the strongest signals in the entire business. A carrier running a hundred and forty percent annual turnover is putting a stranger in a truck every few months and has no accumulated knowledge about any of them.

The money

Somebody insures the carrier, somebody factors its invoices, and somebody gets paid. Each of those relationships is a signal, and each is a place a carrier can be something other than what it appears.

Financial responsibility filings tell you a policy was filed. They don’t tell you the insurer’s financial strength, whether the policy schedules specific autos and drivers rather than covering any auto, whether the limit is adequate for the freight, or whether the coverage has lapsed and been reinstated four times in eighteen months. A carrier placed with a thinly capitalized risk retention group at a minimum limit, hauling high-value freight through a plaintiff-friendly venue, is functionally uninsured against the loss that’s actually possible, and every one of those facts is checkable in advance.

Payment is the fraud tell. When the entity that wants to be paid isn’t the entity that was vetted, something is wrong, and it’s either a factoring assignment nobody documented or it’s somebody else’s load. That check costs nothing and catches a category of loss that vetting the carrier’s safety record will never touch.

8. Where the federal data comes from, and what it can’t tell you

Understanding the limits of the public data is itself part of reasonable care, and it’s the part that separates people who use these systems from people who quote them.

Almost everything you can see about a carrier comes out of the Motor Carrier Management Information System. MCMIS is fed by three things: registration filings the carrier submits about itself, roadside inspections performed by state enforcement, and crash reports submitted by states. Each of those inputs has a bias, and the biases compound.

Roadside inspections are a sample, not a census. A carrier gets inspected when it drives past an open scale, gets selected at a weigh station, or gets stopped. Inspection volume is driven by state enforcement capacity, which is driven by Motor Carrier Safety Assistance Program funding and state priorities, and the variance between states is large. A carrier running lanes through states that inspect aggressively will accumulate a thicker record than an identical carrier running lanes through states that don’t. Two carriers with identical safety practices can look meaningfully different, and the difference is geography.

Absence of data isn’t the same as absence of risk. This is the single most misread thing on a carrier profile. A carrier with three inspections and no violations doesn’t have a clean record. It has almost no record. The screening system reads no violations and returns nothing adverse, and a person under load pressure reads nothing adverse as good. A one-truck authority six months old with two inspections is the least-known carrier on your board, and the least-known carrier isn’t the safest one. Thin data is a risk condition, and it should be scored as one.

SMS percentiles were never a crash predictor, and FMCSA says so. The Safety Measurement System sorts inspection and crash data into behavioral categories and ranks each carrier against a peer group by percentile. FMCSA attaches a disclaimer to the public display saying the data shouldn’t be used to draw conclusions about a carrier’s overall safety. A 2014 Government Accountability Office review found that most of the violations feeding the system didn’t have a demonstrated statistical relationship to crash risk, and that the peer grouping produced unreliable results for the large majority of carriers because they had too few inspections to support a percentile at all. The Driver Fitness category has been shown to run inverse to crash risk in some analyses, which means a worse score predicted fewer crashes. A metric that runs backward isn’t a safety metric.

None of that makes the underlying data useless. It makes the percentile useless. The inspection record itself, read as outcomes rather than as a rank, is one of the better signals available. What you want out of it is out-of-service results rather than paperwork findings, severity rather than count, rate against exposure rather than raw totals, and trend over a rolling window rather than a snapshot. That’s a different reading of the same data, and it’s the reading a competent expert will perform on your file whether you did or not.

Crash counts arrive without fault. The crash indicator counts reportable crashes regardless of preventability. FMCSA’s Crash Preventability Determination Program allows review of certain crash types, but coverage is partial, and the process is slow, so a carrier that was rear-ended at a red light carries that crash in its record the same way it carries one it caused. Reading raw crash counts without adjusting for what the carrier actually did is how you disqualify good carriers and how a plaintiff’s expert makes you look arbitrary on cross.

The MCS-150 is self-reported and frequently garbage. Power units, driver counts, and annual mileage come from the carrier, on a biennial update schedule that many carriers treat as optional. The mileage figure in particular is unreliable in both directions, and both directions are informative. A carrier reporting nine thousand miles a year across three trucks is either dormant or lying, and a carrier reporting three hundred thousand miles per truck is inflating to dilute its own crash rate. That second one is worth understanding, because crash rate normalized by self-reported mileage is a metric the carrier controls the denominator of.

Safety ratings are rare and old. A rating comes out of a compliance review, and most carriers have never had one. The absence of a rating isn’t adverse and should never be scored as adverse, because it describes agency resource allocation rather than carrier behavior. What’s adverse is a rating that exists and is bad. What’s misleading is a satisfactory rating from a compliance review conducted eleven years ago under a different owner, which is a document about a company that no longer exists.

The systems aren’t one system. SAFER returns a snapshot. The SMS site returns the behavioral data. Licensing and Insurance returns the filings of record. QCMobile returns live authority and out-of-service status through an interface that’s current at the time of the call. They don’t all update on the same cycle, and the gap between a cached snapshot and the live record is where false positives and false negatives both live. Any system that gates a decision on authority status or out-of-service order and reads that status from a stored table rather than a live call will eventually reject a good carrier and pass a bad one, and it will do both in the same week.

The honest summary of the public data is that it’s enough to disqualify and not enough to qualify. It will reliably tell you that a carrier is a bad idea. It won’t tell you a carrier is a good one. Everything that separates a good carrier from an unremarkable one lives inside the operation, and Part III is about how to see it.

TOMORROW….Parts III through VII follow: what good looks like from inside the yard, what the losers look like, the vetting protocol, defensibility and the deposition, and where the market goes from here.

Montgomery holding, vote, authorship, date, docket number, procedural history, the Kavanaugh concurrence joined by Alito, the open intrastate question under 14501(b)(1), the untouched vicarious liability question, the facts of the December 7, 2017 crash, and the Ye citation at 74 F.4th 453.

Miller v. C.H. Robinson (9th Cir. 2020) and the Eleventh Circuit Aspen American / Landstar decision. The Morales citation at 504 U.S. 374 (1992) and the Restatement (Second) of Torts section 411

Chamber Institute for Legal Reform nuclear verdict counts and averages, the 2023 count of trucking verdicts over one hundred million dollars, the 2023 workplace fatality share attributed to transportation incidents, the 1980 to 1990 carrier population figures, and the count of states regulating intrastate trucking before 1994.

Everyone wants to blame this administration and ask if Trump, Duffy, and Barrs are doing enough. The data says they’re doing more than anyone else, and the bad actors were already here.

Nearly nine out of ten of the most suspicious motor carriers in the federal registry were already there when President Trump took office in January 2025. That is what the registration data shows for 95,503 carriers flagged for sharing three or more identifiers with other trucking companies. The shared identifiers include vehicle identification numbers, phone numbers, email addresses, company officers, and physical addresses. In fraud detection work, those overlaps are the fingerprints of chameleon carriers, ghost fleets, and authority resale schemes, the same schemes federal regulators have spent the past year promising to root out.

The administration has framed trucking fraud as a problem flowing into the country right now, something it inherited at the border and is actively shutting off. Critics of the administration argue the opposite, that the problem is being manufactured or imported on its watch. The registry tells the data story.

Of the carriers with the heaviest identifier crossover, 87.1% registered with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration before January 2025. Fifty-nine percent registered before January 2021, which means they predate the Biden administration too. These are not new arrivals. The average carrier in this group has sat in the federal registry through multiple administrations, multiple FMCSA administrators, and multiple rounds of promised crackdowns.

The 2021 surge is real

If there is one era that stands out, it is the pandemic authority boom. Carriers that registered during the Biden administration make up 28.2% of the worst-crossover group, the largest single share of any administration. That is against a baseline of 22% for all carriers in the registry. Put another way, Biden-era registrants show up in the fraud-signal population at 1.28 times the rate you would expect from their share of the industry.

Anyone who watched FMCSA grant record numbers of new operating authorities in 2021 and 2022, when spot rates were screaming, and a used Freightliner was a business plan, will not be surprised. The front door was wide open, and the line was long. Some of what walked through was not what it claimed to be.

Trump-era registrants are overrepresented at almost the same rate. Carriers that entered during the first Trump administration show up at 1.23 times their baseline share. Carriers that have entered since January 2025 show up at 1.24 times. The overrepresentation is not a Biden phenomenon. It is a new-authority phenomenon. Fraudulent carriers are born recently by definition, because reincarnation only works with a fresh identity, and the oldest cohorts look cleaner partly because their bad actors were revoked and purged years ago. We have a Northern VA carrier that was shut down with two owners, an address, email, and phone, and reopened seven years later with a new name while everything else remained the same.

12,277 carriers with three or more crossover signals have registered since January 2025. Roughly one in eight of the worst carriers in the data walked in the front door in the past 18 months.

Who is getting enforced?

Registration is half the story. Revocation is the other half. Since January 2025, FMCSA has revoked operating authority for 3,140 carriers in this group for the first time. Of those, 2,656, or 84.6%, registered under previous administrations. The current administration’s own enforcement record shows it is mostly mopping up carriers it inherited, which is exactly what you would expect when 87% of the problem predates you.

In fairness, the mopping is faster. The Biden administration revoked 4,689 of these carriers over four years, roughly 1,170 per year. The current pace works out to roughly 2,400 per year through May 2026. The enforcement machine is running about twice as hard against this population as it did in the prior term. Both things are true at once. The crackdown is real, and what it is cracking down on was already here.

Of the 95,503 carriers in this group, 80,513, or 84.3%, have never had an authority revocation. Fewer than 5% ever received an out-of-service order under the New Entrant Safety Assurance Program, the screening process designed to catch exactly this profile in a carrier’s first 18 months. The program that is supposed to be the filter caught one in twenty.

Carriers that entered during the Biden boom and eventually got revoked lasted an average of 639 days before FMCSA pulled their authority. That is 21 months, comfortably past the new entrant window. They did not slip through a crack but instead walked through the front door, aged out of the only mandatory screening program, and operated until something else caught them.

One more detail from deep in the data. At least 53 carriers in this group hold USDOT numbers that FMCSA did not begin issuing until after 2011, yet they carry operating authority revocations served in the 1980s and 1990s. A DOT number cannot be revoked before it exists. The only way those records connect is through the docket, meaning the operating authority died under one identity and now sits on a company registered years later. The reincarnation pattern is visible in the government’s own tables, if anyone cares to look.

What the data doesn’t say

This analysis does not identify individual carriers as fraudulent. Sharing a VIN or an address with another carrier can have legitimate explanations, including equipment leasing, family businesses, and registered agent addresses. Some of the highest-crossover records in the data are almost certainly leasing operations whose equipment lawfully appears under many customer DOT numbers. The three-signal threshold exists to filter coincidence, not to convict anyone.

What the data does say is simple. The population of carriers that fits the fraud profile was built over 20 years, under every administration, through a registration system that asks few questions and a new entrant program that answers almost none. Whoever holds the White House inherits it. The current administration inherited 87% of it and is revoking it faster than its predecessor did. The problem was not imported. It was licensed, one USDOT number at a time, mostly under non-Trump administrations. Arguably, there has never been a more active administration when it comes to enforcement and barriers to entry. That's just the data-backed facts.

James Richardson was seriously injured when a truck operated by Night Dream Inc. hit him at 53rd and Western in Chicago. He litigated. He won a $1 million settlement. He signed the release and delivered the documents.

He collected nothing. Night Dream’s insurer was Spirit Commercial Auto Risk Retention Group, and by the time the settlement came due, Spirit was in receivership in Nevada. Because Spirit was a risk retention group, Richardson had no access to the guaranty fund in Nevada or in Illinois. The appellate court that reviewed his case acknowledged the unfairness and could do nothing about it. A judgment, a settlement, a signed release, and an empty bag.

That is what trucking’s shadow insurance market does to the people it hits. This is about how big that market is, what it looks like in the federal data, and what happened when the government started wiring the easiest money in American history to the carriers riding on it. The short version: one in three carriers on the road today is running on paper nobody underwrote, the dead insurers left 1,770 bodies in their books, and roughly $1.9 billion in pandemic relief went to trucking entities whose own federal registration proves they weren’t eligible for it.

None of this required a leak or a subpoena. Every number below comes from matching federal databases that have been public the entire time. Nobody ever put them on the same desk.

The worst paper

Insurance is the last real barrier to entry in trucking. Strip away the paperwork, and here is how you become an interstate motor carrier in America: you file for a free, unvetted DOT number; you spend $300 and file for authority; you pay $25 and designate a process agent; and an insurer files a BMC-91 on your behalf. That last step is the entire gate. The new entrant audit is largely an educational formality most carriers pass from a kitchen table. The safety rating system is so backlogged that most carriers will never be rated at all. The insurance filing is the one moment where somebody with money on the line is supposed to look at you and decide whether you belong on the road.

That gate has been dismantled from two directions at once, and we put a size on each direction.

From below, you have instant-issue paper. There are programs today that will bind liability coverage on a brand-new authority the same day it applies, priced by algorithm, no loss history because there is no history of any kind. Nobody in that chain loses money if the carrier turns out to be a disaster. The MGA got paid at binding. The fronting company got paid to lend its name. The risk lands on a reinsurer three layers away or on a thinly capitalized vehicle that was never going to pay a large claim anyway. When I classify the active filings in the federal database by whether real underwriting stood behind them, 71,953 carriers, 34 percent of everything on the road with a current filing, come back non-underwritten. One in three.

From the side, you have the risk retention group. Congress created RRGs in the Liability Risk Retention Act of 1986, during a genuine liability insurance crisis, to let businesses in the same industry band together and insure themselves. The design has two features that matter. An RRG is chartered in one state and can then write in all fifty, with the other forty-nine federally preempted from regulating it. RRGs are barred by federal law, at 15 U.S.C. 3902, from participating in state guaranty funds. For a hospital system insuring its own professional liability, the model works. For commercial trucking liability, where the losses are sudden, catastrophic, and land on strangers who never chose the insurer, it is a machine for privatizing premiums and socializing the wreckage. Today, 7,034 active carriers are riding on it, and they carry 16 percent more crashes per carrier than everyone else, on books that skew toward small fleets that should, if anything, crash less. The paper knows.

Federal Motor Carriers Risk Retention Group was run into liquidation in 2011. The man regulators identified as controlling it through its program manager then stood up Spirit Commercial Auto RRG in Nevada in 2012. Spirit collapsed in 2019 with roughly $199 million in unpaid losses against about $42 million in assets, a forensic audit that found at least $30 million missing, and a state civil complaint calling the whole arrangement a vast fraudulent enterprise. Premium trust money found its way into a cryptocurrency hedge fund. While Spirit was still writing, a third RRG with ties to the same network was formed in North Carolina. Same playbook, three charters, two insolvencies, and no mechanism anywhere in the system that said stop.

One year after Spirit, Global Hawk Risk Retention Group failed in Vermont. Its filings claimed $42.7 million in assets. Regulators went to the banks and found $609,489. Six hundred nine thousand dollars, against $11.9 million in case reserves on 224 open claims. The court’s liquidation order said the 1,008 trucks it covered were effectively uninsured. Federal prosecutors charged Global Hawk’s president, Jasbir Thandi, with misappropriating more than $19 million, including more than $1 million wired to an entity in the British Virgin Islands, and he has since pleaded guilty to two counts of conspiracy to commit insurance fraud.

Put a number on what those three companies left behind. Over their operating lifetimes, Federal Motor Carriers, Spirit, and Global Hawk held 21,035 carrier relationships across 19,588 distinct motor carriers. Those carriers ran up 49,812 crashes in the record, 1,478 of them fatal, 1,770 people dead, 23,519 injured. Every one of those policies was sold with no guaranty fund behind it by insurers that no longer exist, and every claim that matured after the collapses chased a liquidation estate instead of a check. Fifty-nine of those carriers managed to be insured by all three companies in turn, riding one collapsing RRG into the next. Forty-one of the filings, to this day, have never had a cancellation recorded in the federal system. The insurers are dead. The paperwork does not know it.

Underneath all of it sits a floor set when Jimmy Carter was president. The $750,000 federal minimum dates to 1980. Adjusted for ordinary inflation, it would be north of $2 million; adjusted for medical inflation, which is what actually drives crash costs, closer to $3.7 million. The minimum is not a safety rule. It is a compensation rule. It exists so that when a carrier kills or maims somebody, the loss falls on the enterprise that created the risk instead of on the family, on Medicaid, and on the rest of us. We have the data. It’s built on FMCSA’s own data.

The easiest money

Put that market next to the spring of 2020, when the federal government started wiring disaster money to anyone with a business identity. I matched the SBA’s own bulk loan data against FMCSA’s insurance filings, carrier by carrier, exact legal name confirmed against physical state, insured entities only. The match: 27,923 insured motor carriers received $2.35 billion in Economic Injury Disaster Loans.

Some of it is exactly what the program was for. In March, April, and May of 2020, motorcoach and limousine operators, who show up all over this data with the largest loans, watched their entire industry stop existing in a week. A charter bus company taking $500,000 in April 2020 is not a scandal. By June, spot rates were fine, and by the fall the industry was entering the most profitable stretch small trucking had ever seen. Rates went vertical and stayed there for eighteen months. The loans kept flowing.

Sort the money by the type of insurance paper the recipients ran on, because in trucking, the paper tells you which carrier the recipient is. Cross the shadow market against the loan data, and 1,086 carriers running on RRG paper collected $79.6 million in EIDL money.

Some of that is defensible. The biggest single book belongs to the OOIDA Risk Retention Group, the owner-operator association’s long-standing mutual: 235 carriers, $12.3 million, and owner-operators were exactly the businesses the early-2020 market genuinely hurt. But OOIDA’s role in this market deserves a second look. Its leadership has testified against raising the federal insurance minimum at least six times, its COO sits as secretary on the national RRG association’s board, and that association’s own marketing credits OOIDA with leading the charge that killed a proposed increase to $4.5 million per truck. Meanwhile, OOIDA championed aggressive English-proficiency enforcement, which became an out-of-service offense in June 2025, and carriers insured by risk retention groups draw ELP citations at a rate 38% higher per inspection than the rest of the fleet. Hold the two positions side by side. Fight to keep the paper cheap; fight to take the drivers who ride on it out of service. They only look contradictory until you notice what they have in common: in both, the carrier keeps buying the policy right up until the roadside inspection ends the trip. The premium clears either way. Whatever else that is, it is not the voice of the small trucker. It is the voice of the paper.

Then there is the Spirit lineage, still collecting. County Hall, the third RRG tied to the network that produced two liquidations, shows 78 matched carriers drawing $6.57 million in disaster loans through the same season receivers were still counting what was missing from the last collapse. Universal Casualty, an insurer whose book I have reported on in connection with a multistate carrier network now in federal litigation, shows 108 carriers matched to $11.05 million.

Then there is the finding that should have stopped the SBA. Global Hawk was seized by Vermont regulators in the spring of 2020; its liquidation order entered June 8. In the data, twelve EIDL disbursements totaling $649,200 went to carriers whose insurance filing of record was Global Hawk, every one of them approved between June 5 and September 4, 2020. During and after the liquidation. A carrier shows a Global Hawk policy effective March 17, 2020, riding that paper straight through the collapse. On September 4, 2020, the SBA approved it for $150,000. Its Global Hawk filing lapsed two days later. Federal disaster money, approved to a carrier insured by a corpse, two days before the paperwork showed it.

One more thing the data coughed up. There is a suite at 30 N Gould Street in Sheridan, Wyoming, a registered agent’s mail drop, lawful to use. FMCSA shows 95 registered motor carriers at that address. The SBA’s loan data shows 115 EIDL recipients there, totaling more than $5.1 million to one mailbox, and most of the recipients are not trucking companies. They are e-commerce shells, crypto consultancies, supplement brands, an outfit called American Pillowcase. Two federal systems accepted the same empty suite as a place where businesses exist, because the door checks nothing.

The costume

The insured match undersells the problem, because the insured carriers were the ones who at least owned a filing. Widen the match to every motor carrier in the SBA data, EIDL and Paycheck Protection Program both, and the full picture is 85,493 carriers and $7.99 billion. Then sort by one column: the DOT registration date.

On Aug. 26, 2020, an entity registered for a USDOT number. Registration is free. It takes about three minutes. Nobody at FMCSA reviews it. On Sept. 1, six days later, an insurance filing became active on it, written by United Financial Casualty, a Progressive subsidiary that quotes and binds trucking policies online. On Sept. 2, one day after the insurance and seven days after the company, the SBA approved that company for a $150,000 EIDL loan.

EIDL had one bright-line eligibility rule: the business had to be in operation on Jan. 31, 2020. That business certified that it met that rule. Its federal registration says the company came into existence 208 days after the deadline.

It was not unusual. It was just first. There are 17,631 carriers in the match whose USDOT numbers were created after Jan. 31, 2020. They received $1.46 billion in EIDL funds across 18,144 loans. PPP had its own cutoff, Feb. 15, 2020; run the same test and 8,357 carriers with post-deadline DOT numbers collected $478 million. Combined, roughly $1.9 billion in pandemic relief paid to trucking entities whose federal birth certificate postdates the eligibility deadline the money was conditioned on.

A DOT registration date is not a conviction. A landscaping business that bought a truck in June 2020 was a real business in January. An intrastate hauler that went interstate mid-pandemic had a life before its DOT number. Some fraction of those 17,631 carriers has an innocent explanation, and any individual name on the list deserves the presumption that it might be one of them. The aggregate does not need individual guilt to mean something. When 17,631 entities certify a start date that their own federal paperwork contradicts, the question stops being about the borrowers. It becomes a question about the system that never checked. The SBA had the FMCSA registration date. Both datasets are federal. Both are public. They don’t communicate. We downloaded and merged them.

Look at what the machine actually was. Three pieces. The free federal identity: a bare DOT number requires no fee, no fitness review, no human, just a request filled out online. The instant insurance: quote online, bind online, certificate in your inbox, and the certificate looks identical whether you have run freight for twenty years or registered last Tuesday. The self-certified loan: EIDL ran the application through an algorithm confirming the documents existed rather than a person confirming the business did. Stack the three, and ten minutes of form-filling becomes a credible, insured, federally registered business entity, ready to receive federal money. Need to move a load to keep up appearances? Rent a truck for the day.

The data shows the machine running at speed. In the match, 1,073 carriers registered their DOT number in 2020 and had loan money approved within 90 days of registration; the median gap between the DOT number and the loan was 46 days, and $77.3 million went to companies younger than a season. Among post-deadline carriers, 79 verified entities had held their insurance for 60 days or less on the day the SBA said yes. Twenty-two of them held it for two weeks or less. The median policy in that group was 25 days old.

Wildest finding of all: of the $7.99 billion in matched EIDL funds, $5.55 billion, 69 cents of every dollar, went to 56,858 carriers with no federal insurance filing history of any kind. Not lapsed. Not canceled. Nothing, ever. Some of that is legal and expected; private and purely intrastate carriers owe FMCSA no filing, but for more than two-thirds of the dollars, the recipient’s entire relationship with federal transportation regulation was a free form. The DOT number, the one that costs nothing and asks nothing, was the sole federal credential behind $5.5 billion in federal lending. The registration architecture I have described for years as a safety hole turns out to double as loan collateral.

The fingerprints

Free DOT registrations carry neither shame nor scrutiny, and self-certified loans carry only what the borrower typed. Insurance filings carry dates and names. So take every EIDL loan attributable to a specific liability insurer whose filing was in force on approval day, $1.04 billion across 11,369 loans, and count backward from the approval to the day the policy took effect.

The national median is 351 days. The typical carrier that received pandemic relief had been carrying its insurance for about a year by the time the check arrived. It bought the policy to run trucks, not to dress up an application. Roughly one loan in ten, 10.8 percent, went to a carrier whose paper was less than 60 days old. New businesses exist. That is the baseline.

Now sort by insurer, and watch certain books fall out of the distribution. At Blue Hill Specialty, 41 percent of the loans in the book went to carriers whose policy was less than 60 days old on approval day. Four times the national rate. United Wisconsin, 32.5 percent. Trisura Specialty, 32.1. Manufacturers Alliance, 29. Qualitas, 27.5. American Sentinel, 25.7. Among the RRGs, A-One Commercial ran at 24.1. These are not enormous books; Blue Hill’s figure comes from 39 loans, Trisura’s from 81, A-One’s from 29, and small books can produce loud percentages, which is why the baseline matters. A book where four in ten federal borrowers bought their insurance on the way to the loan window is not a book that looks like trucking. It is a book that looks like paperwork.

For contrast, look at OOIDA’s book, the largest RRG lender population in the match at 200 borrowers. The median borrower there had held its policy for 647 to 1,114 days by the time the loan arrived. Two or three years. The share with fresh paper ranged from zero to 3.4 percent. Owner-operators who had carried their coverage since before anyone had heard of Wuhan hit a real economic wall and took the relief the program existed to provide. That is what the program was for, and that is what a membership organization’s book looks like. Hold that picture next to a book where four in ten borrowers were new arrivals, and you no longer need me to editorialize about the difference. The problem a legitimate RRG like OOIDA faces in its role as leadership of the RRG Association, where other not-as-great RRGs live.

EIDL’s public data does not disclose loan performance. PPP’s does, and PPP tells you how the story ended. Among matched carriers whose filing history includes a risk retention group, 5.84 percent of PPP loans were charged off, $20 million in confirmed taxpayer losses. Among carriers on traditional paper, the charge-off rate was 2.36 percent. Two and a half times the default rate, concentrated in the corner of the insurance market with the least regulatory oversight, the corner that has collapsed repeatedly from Spirit to Global Hawk to Universal Casualty. When an RRG collapses, its insureds’ crash victims wait in line at a liquidation. When its insureds’ federal loans default, the taxpayer eats that too. The public paid for both ends of the same book.

One structural point. The insurers behind the pandemic-born carriers, the week-old policies and day-old loans, were not fringe RRGs. They were the largest, most legitimate writers in the non-standard market: Great West, the Progressive family, Lancer, Wesco. Every one of those policies was legal to sell and legal to buy. The observation is about the missing man. Trucking insurance used to come with an underwriter, a human being whose job was to ask who you were and whether your story held together before the certificate printed. Instant-issue replaced that person with a rating engine. The underwriter was never designed to be a fraud checkpoint for federal lending, but he was one, the way a bank teller is a checkpoint, just by being a person who looks at you. In 2020, when a self-certified loan program needed the private market to vet its applicants, the vetting had already been automated.

So here is where four datasets and one investigation land. The registration pathway that lets an unvetted entity put trucks on American highways is the identical pathway that let unvetted entities into the federal loan portfolio. FMCSA gave the identity away for free and made no fitness determination. The insurance market sold the credibility layer with no underwriter at the door. The SBA wired the money with no loan officer in the loop. Three agencies and an industry, each removing its own gate for its own defensible reasons, and nobody responsible for the fact that all the gates were gone at once. Congress is being told, right now, that the data does not exist to evaluate any of this. The data exists. It is public. What does not exist anywhere in the federal government is a single desk where the insurance filing, the loan record, the crash file, and the corporate registration are read together.

The filing dates told us which borrowers dressed for the occasion. The insurer names told us whose counter they dressed at. The charge-off rates told us, three years later, which paper was covering businesses and which paper was covering stories. The government did not just fail to catch the paper carriers. It printed the paper.